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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

That's why we have back buttons, no?

Most (if not all) default browsers on mobile, auto scroll/hide the navigation bar off the display after a few seconds. For most non-techie users this means it's 'gone'. Ergo, they have no back button anymore. I've watched many people just open/shut/open/shut their mobile browser just to get back to previous pages - in many cases even re-searching the same query over and over again.

This is modus operandi for many users, hence why Google inserting a big 'go back to Google' banner at the top, is a bad[1] thing.

[1] Or from the standard user point of view, a good thing.

On Samsung Android the back button (↩) is always on the bottom right of the device (below the screen)

For the browser that is back, and if you opened the page in a new window then back means close it and reveal the previous page.

Maybe not everybody realizes that and uses it. I didn't at first but now it's a happy habit.

But this is just an iOS thing, right? Android has either a hardware back button, or a software back button that's always shown (except for fullscreen apps, such as Youtube and games).

Software buttons hide when using full screen apps and can be made visible again by a swipe from the bottom.

Isn't Google in charge of Android? Seems like they could fix the button-hiding there instead of adding an HTML workaround for every AMQP website.

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