I hate when I hit back, but instantly redirect to the same page. This is so frustrating when it happens. And it happens even on major sites. (Microsoft’s official community “answers” forums have given me this issue lately. Fills up search results and then traps you there)
Briefly, the user may need to press back a couple times in order to escape, but the maximum number of presses needed is bounded and is dependent on how much the user interacts with the page. Of note, closing the tab bypasses this API entirely, at least according to that page.
Also, GitHub team, could you make your app better? It has so many little annoyances.
The funny/sad thing is the folks adding this functionality are probably reading my comment. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Also, why doesn't the back button disable any automatic (non-user initiated) redirects on pages loaded that way? Seems like an obvious fix to the history loops we keep seeing.
Often, news aggregators add to urls so the site knows where it came from, or it’s using a feed that already has that.
Now, that said, in an email, you can send links that encode that it’s coming from email, but you would get caught by the non-gmail using people suddenly seeing fake gmail.