Hacker News Reader

Twitter's implementation of the hashbang was awful. It broke the back button and it was slow. I don't think it's a fair representation of the technique.

EDIT: And based on their implementation, I wouldn't trust anything their engineers have to say about hashbangs either.

View on HN

In what sense did it break the back button? Back takes you to the previous thing you clicked correctly.

It didn't break back. It just hijacked the browser's history by adding a 2nd page load in order to inject the "!#" into the address bar. Pressing back would, as a result, act like the refresh button.

I don't follow you. Changing the functional behavior of the back button _sounds_ a lot like broken.

I'm not sure that this is the case.

Back works as expected - it takes you to the previous page you were at. Fragment identifiers don't break the back button. That's all from a user perspective's point of view, which is mostly all that matters in the end.

If you look at this from a technical standpoint, then back is a refresh of twitter.com, yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com