Hacker News Reader

Comment by purephase | Hacker News Reader

BBC hijacks the back button? Weird choice, that.

Seems like they're redirecting me from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com with history, so the back button only changes my country unless I hit it fast enough.

I wonder why they don't use `location.replace` [1]. It isn't exactly new.

Edit: ah, I see, it doesn't work for changing domains. Still, they could use e.g. bbc.co.uk/[country-code]/ as many other sites do.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location/re...

Redirection is often erroneous, then destroying the history exacerbates the error. Data destruction is an antifeature, really.

I see where you're coming from, but having to press back twice quickly to get back to the page I actually came from is very annoying. It's essentially impossible on mobile.

Perhaps browsers should disable redirection on pages that have been reached via the back button? That could add a lot of complexity.

In Firefox for Android, I can press and hold on the Back button in the '…' menu (not Android's Back button) to show the current Rab's history as a list. By touching an old history entry, I can navigate directly to it, skipping any redirects.

It's redirects international visitors to bbc.com

I think it's because they have ads internationally but aren't allowed to have ads in the UK

You have to wonder why that was a choice, when they could serve/not serve ads based on location, instead of hard redirecting.

SEO mainly. They prefer to use .com for international stuff and keep uk users on .co.uk

Could be a legal issue. If they have a legal requirement to not serve ads in the UK it's good to have a clean separation where they can see if the redirect is broken.

This is very annoying. I sometimes want to see how BBC is covering events from a UK perspective, but it always redirects to bbc.com.

I could switch my VPN to UK, but it never seems worth the effort.

Looks like it's a script that redirects. I have noscript and scripts are disabled by default and the site doesn't redirect me.

It’s interesting to compare bbc.com vs bbc.co.uk reporting. You should try it for a month or two and see what you think.

It works for me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com