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Comment by calibas | Hacker News Reader

Especially scummy when they've also broken the functionality of the back button and all the links are to other BBC articles.

It's like the main function of the site is to trap you.

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"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're in the US like I am, I think it's because the BBC redirects all non-UK visitors to BBC.com, and so when you hit the back button from BBC.com you get sent back to BBC.co.uk which in turn redirects you to BBC.com. It gets on my nerves too.

I thought back-button hijacking, malicious or accidental, had been solved in browsers years ago. I suppose I need to go search for an extension to fix that instead.

Could be but I am also seeing a trend where some websites manipulate the navigation history so that when you click the back button in your browser you end up at their home page even if you came to the page you are currently on via some other site.

I first saw this on Facebook but I have since seen even sites that I used to respect follow this same pattern.

To me this is nothing but another dark pattern.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a browser engineered to protect against that? I'm tired of struggling with dark patterns every day, from URL hijacking to modal dialogs with deliberately broken layouts to scrolljacking.

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