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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily: I do not want to click back 30 times to get out of your slideshow and back to my Google results. Thank you.

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The problem there is the slide show. Converting a series of slides to a page in traditional vertical scrolling format works just fine. Overriding the back button behavior is just expecting a second wrong to make a right.

(Ironically, these days I'm relieved when I see a presentation is posted as a PDF: https://people.apache.org/~xli/presentations/history_Intel_C.... I'd much rather load a PDF than deal with all the shitty and insane ways people have figured out how to show presentations in HTML. Cough SlideShare: https://www.slideshare.net/garyachy/dpdk-44585840)

Your example is exactly why we have both History.pushState and History.replaceState[0]. The core question there is whether a new slide represents a new page or not. And in this case, I agree that it doesn't: it's the same page, just in a different state.

EDIT: If you mean one of those 20-image slideshows intentionally made to create fake click statistics, I agree that that's absolutely infuriating. But in that case ergothus' comment applies: the real problem is bad faith webdesign in that case.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History#Met...

And this example pretty much nails the theme: there is no technical reason for these problems. If a website screws it up, it's just bad design at this point.

Broad support for history management is well-established at this point: https://caniuse.com/#feat=history

But the problem there is that they used a carousel in the first place. Were it content that justified clicking 30 times into it, it would also justify backing out of it 30 times.

For something like a slideshow, I think you could have it both ways - default to a scroll view that shows all of the slides at once, and make it so clicking a slide shows the slide on a single page that is deep-linkable. The user could then navigate forward and backward between each individual slide page if they so desire.

I suppose it's all a matter of trying to do what will best match user expectations. Or just whatever will make them happiest. Maybe call it the principle of least annoyance.

Of course, if you make an ad supported slideshow app, maybe you want to show one slide per page to get more ad impressions. I suppose that would be the principle of maximum revenue, along with its corollary (from the user's perspective): the principle of maximum indignation.

The problem is that it might take a half-dozen clicks to realize it's not worth reading the other 24, then you need to click back a half-dozen times (worse if there are page reloads during that).

That's my point though - if it takes a half-dozen clicks to decide it's not worth it, then they weren't using a good format anyway. You likely did the last 5 clicks hoping things would be different after the click - the click itself was NOT a value add.

I'm not saying it isn't useful to bypass that to get back, but then you're literally asking the people that made the bad design decision in the first place to make the good one to let you out - and they likely won't, for the same reasons they gave you that UI in the first place.

Or, use another built-in feature of the browser's back button. Click-and-hold the back button so that you can see a contextual menu with the steps you can go back to quickly. If I click back more than twice, the third is a click-and-hold.

That's what "open in new tab" solves.

Try right-clicking the back button. Or complain to your browser maker -- they're responsible for its behaviour.

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