Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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While I completely agree with you for normal websites, web apps are an entirely different beast. I think it's quite reasonable that applications have some extra logic to deal with navigation, because they're built for complex interaction, not for displaying information.

I think it's quite reasonable to want to respond to a back gesture to cancel a modal that asks if you're sure about deleting <some resource>. You could render everything server side to get website-like navigation, but for these things JS is probably one of the better mechanisms to make user interaction more pleasing.

This stuff should absolutely be kept away from news sites, blogs and other web resources because they're awful enough already with their constant popups about signing up for newsletters, accepting notifications and pitiful pleas to use their app. For your average PWA, though, this is definitely a bad thing.

>This stuff should absolutely be kept away from news sites, blogs and other web resources because they're awful enough already with their constant popups about signing up for newsletters, accepting notifications and pitiful pleas to use their app

I’m sure these sites would respect your wishes and not use this for nefarious purposes!

You see, features like this would make the Web worse for 99.99% of users by enabling shitty websites’ abuses, while making it just a tiny bit better for those who insist on the subpar experience of running general purpose applications in their browsers.

So yeah, that’s gonna be a no from me.

The History API [1] already allows browsers to change the back button behavior. Safari seems to ignore it when the swipe is large enough to trigger the back animation though, but it is most definitely a thing on desktop.

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

yep I love accidentally visiting Business Insider and having to click back about 30 times through clickbait to leave the godawful place

> web apps are an entirely different beast.

They are not. They are websites running inside a browser. So, they must respect the browser. If they pretend to be standalone and not care about the browser, it's their own fault, and not the browser's.

And yes. The browser cannot distinguish between your shitty "web app" and a regular site.

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