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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Wow. TechCrunch is hijacking the back button on mobile in a really bad way. After opening the link I see 5+ entries in my browser history, meaning I have to use the back button really a lot to go back to HN!

What a great way to make me feel I shouldn’t have agreed to the the Oath screen ...

View on HN

And when you scroll down to the end of the page you will be redirected to some other page and you cannot scroll up back to origin.

What is wrong with you web developers? Have you ever used a mouse-wheel before??

I have no clue why so many sites break the scroll wheel, break the back button, break default functionality that you'd otherwise get for free.

I've successfully pushed back against requirements to do this, and I've unsuccessfully pushed back. I've tried to not do this kind of thing in my own work whenever possible. Usually it's very easy to do so, because it's the default behavior that you get for free.

It a/b tests well for some metric they love

Yes, being forced to hit back button 5 times equals 4 additonal page views :)

Even more if those are auto forwarding you faster than you can hit it

Most computer users are not terribly computer literate. A friend who I'd consider pretty tech savvy (can build his own PC's) just discovered clicking in the mouse wheel opens a new page.

Web Developers know most people wont be affected if they break some functions.

I'm seeing more and more sites with infinite scroll, and I hate it every time, but I haven't seen one yet where you cant scroll back up.

It feels incredible distracting when another article appears out of nowhere when you have just finished reading one.

The URL changing on scroll is really confusing. I've often tried to link a techcrunch article, only to realize I linked the wrong one...

Incidentally javascript is completely unnecessary to read the article: https://0x0.st/zZIt.png

I strongly recommend blocking all javascript, including first party javascript, by default. You'll probably be surprised how many websites won't require you to whitelist anything.

I hate TC in this regard, so much so that I don't read it anymore and I'm afraid to click their links. If you scroll too much, the page you were reading disappears, you see completely different content. The back button doesn't work. Overall it's really confusing and gives me anxiety because I don't know if what I'm reading is what I came here for.

I use those GDRP screens for a little moment of mindfulness now to consider, whether I really want to read the article behind it. The answer has turned out to be almost always no and I don’t think I’ve missed much.

I have to use it twice. That's still pretty bad.

I use kindle to read HN, except for JS stuff (voting) everything works & so does 90% of linked articles.

Article Mode on Kindle makes the reading experience pleasant, but doesn't work for sites like Techcrunch using nasty Javascripts.

Press and hold

It's not just mobile.

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