Redirect to prevent back button

Yeah, I also hate back-button hijacking. I suspect some websites do it to artificially force more page views for ad revenue. Try a long-press on the back button to view the history for that browser tab and click on the most recent page you think won't redirect.

I usually right click the back button and go 2 entries back. Done.
Microsoft also does this a lot on some of their sites.
- I usually just block the site.
Youtube does it, and it just continues to blast the wrong video you accidentally just auto-started because instead if fucking off, it shows other videos with the bad video getting just reduced.
Aaargh for the state of todays internet
- I use YouTube on desktop daily and I've never had this happen to me.
- I've had this happen only when I go back too quickly, before the page can completely load in

Also: Algorithmic generated feeds where you try to click on one thing, but you click on the next thing in the list and when you click back, the feed looks completely different because it has new information on you. That thing you wanted to click on is gone and will never return.

That's actually how I do my Lemmy feed. I have one chance to comment on a thread and if I don't do it, when the page refreshes I lose it forever.
I've learned to accept that there are just some things the universe never wanted me to comment on.
- Now is your chance to finally let it all out...
- I'd love that, my entire frontpage is the same 30 things over and over unless I deliberately sort for something then it's a DIFFERENT 30 things over and over
thats the reason why i always open links with middle click to open a new tab. helps with the above fuckery too.
- ...and now you've hit upon my other peeve: (mostly shopping) sites coded to disable browsing links in a new tab...
Hate that on YouTube…
- What's worse is that YouTube sometimes doesn't do that, i.e. when you hit back it shows the same list from the cache or something. It gives you hope and makes it worse on those occasions when it does fully refresh on back.
Youtube recommended videos does this. Not a huge issue because I can always search for the video myself but it's annoying.
- Ugh yes.
  Though on desktop I've completely switched over to using FreeTube, and I've been loving it. The order of the videos in the feed does not change. It's great.

I was just thinking about this.

Super annoying because it can actually be fixed by using History.replaceState() over History.pushState().

I guess the reason they do it is either to keep you stuck on their sucky site, or just incompetence.

You're right, but "incompetence" seems harsh. Maybe I'm just sensitive today.
- Hanlon's Razor: Don't attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.

Microsoft does this with the Xbox forums and it bothers me so much

MS does this with ALL their forums, and it’s cunty.
- MS does this. They do it everywhere.
- They do this with all their sites ime.
- Quickly going back twice always works with MS forums. First page logs you in (or fails) and the second is the page you wanted to go.
Only the first time you visit in a while though.
I think it's taking you away to a login page, logging you in, then bringing you back.
I can see the point if you were going to ask or answer a question, but 99% of the time you just want to see how somebody else didn't get their problem solved by some random Indian guy who people assume works for Microsoft, who think the solution to everything is running "sfc /scannow" which has replaced chkdsk as the command most likely to take a long time, do nothing, and make the question asker go away without a solution to their problem.
- I don't allow any cookies on my browser, so that would explain why it happens to me every time

Couldn't be me. Opening links in a new tab master race

I firmly believe this is how we wound up with tabs as a feature in the first place.
- Unrelated, but nice username
Middle click is muscle memory. Has been for 20 years.

Open all links in new tabs.

This sounds horrible. I already have a tab issue
- Either use tree tabs, or just close it when you're done.

Oh man I hate this shit so much.

Added to my blocked websites

This is one of the absolute greatest reasons to support opening most everything in a new tab (as long as you don't end up like my mom who at one point had over 100 tabs on her phone). Doesn't matter if it's a link from the same website, from a search engine, or whatever else there is. New tab.

Then on android Firefox you accidentally hit the back button and it closes the tab and you can't go forward and you already navigatedc away from the originating page on the other tab forcing you to open your history and try to figure out where the hell it is.
- Ctrl Shift T doesn't work on that case?
  Edit: I skipped the Android bit, sorry.
  Edit 2: From the 3 dots menu INSIDE the tabs view you can access a list of recently closed tabs, not nearly as fast as a 3 key combo, but maybe better than looking for the tab in the history. Also apparently there's an extension that may help.

Firefox should really implement a feature that hides this bullshit from the previous sites menu

Go to about:config and set "browser.navigation.requireUserInteraction" to true

I've always wondered. Is there really a benefit to a ton of redirects like that? Like, do they gain anything by making it harder to back out?

Or is it just extremely incompetent website programming?

I always just assumed it was a form of "dark pattern" meant to try to stop people from leaving their website once they've entered (e.g., coming from a different site, you can't just hit backspace or click back to immediately exit their site. You're stuck now).
- I think that's right for a website where you accidentally clicked an ad and now it's trying to convince you you have a virus and you need to download their virus to remove it. Or maybe for an ad pop-up where annoying you might increase the chances that the content makes it into your brain.
  But for a news website i have trouble seeing the logic.
more ads displayed with each redirect i guess?

Holy smokes I never realized this intended behaviour, but of couse it is...

Out of curiosity how old are you?
- I'm 31, in my defense I was exhausted on tuesday...

microsoft does this with their community support/forums/whatever and it's annoying when you're trying to look up a problem in google. :///

Double-clicking the back button usually works for me on Firefox

What makes me angry here is, I am 90% sure the browsers could code against this.

If the user clicks a control on a webpage one time, the stack can declare "One user click! You have earned yourself One (1) navigation." Then, the click activates some JavaScript that moves you to a new webpage. That new webpage has an auto-loader redirect that instead runs a 300ms timeout, and then takes you to some other page. The browser, meanwhile, has seen this, and establishes "We are still only operating off of that One (1) click. So, instead of adding a new page to the user history, we'll replace that first navigation."

I have yet to hear a satisfactory reason as to why that's not possible.

We just got vertical align last month. There's so many things they should be working on but are too busy trying to add more ads or monetization features.
I think the web is just too long in the tooth at this point but there's nothing we can do.
- CSS features like vertical alignment would be defined by web standards. Those fall under the non-profit org W3C. They're pretty slow about things as to not break the fuck out of everything.
  Browser behaviour like merging redirects falls on browsers tho, so yeah, we can blame Chrome or FF on that one.

You've reminded me of a similar frustration that I've never found the answer to - though it may be adblock related - in that whenever I open a link to eBay it completely wipes the history for that tab. Or possibly it opens a new tab and kills the parent. Either way I always forget about it until the next time and then it drives me mad all over again.

Reddit has been doing this when I click a result from a Google search (yeah, sometimes you have to)
It’s fucking annoying and I hope whatever JavaScript trick lets them do this gets blocked
- I use a Firefox based browser and this hasn't happened to me, are you using Chromium or Safari? Could be a browser specific issue

Aren't they scamming their advertisers too? Because if you click the back button a bunch of times it's gonna reload a bunch of them on every click. At least if your internet is fast enough.

Impressions are usually deduped, meaning multiple impressions from the same user during the same session are just counted as one. The big ad networks are extremely careful to avoid miscounting of any sort and will generally err on the side of undercounting rather than overcounting (since telling advertisers they got more impressions or clicks than reported is way better than telling them the numbers were accidentally inflated). Of course, there's the occasional bug, but it mostly works as expected.
- I just realized you meant data deduplication instead of "not duped by you bitches anymore"
- Does it also cover reloading with different ads? (such that it would count impressions for different advertisers)

just click again, but fast enough to get the redirect, but not too fast to miss it and double click, and try not to do it a third time or you're going back a few ages.

Or right click the back button
- Or ctrl+w to close the fucking site and never come back.
- I always held it. Now I feel like the same I did before.
- but that's boring! Also then i have to use my mouse.

yo honk honk am here to help. Right click the back button to bring up a menu of several previous pages select when it was the search engine or whatever you used before. For Firefox. If you're on chrome, you can cry. Honk honk, goose out.

Isn't that exactly what OP's screenshot is depicting?
- Honk honk am goose, no braincells. Honk.
On Firefox you can also hold your left click on the back arrow for the same effect.
Wait, toads don't goose...
Goose says "Gaa-ga"(Hauge)

MASSIVELY infuriating.

"mildly" infuriating

I think there was an extension named Skip Redirect that solved this issue...

Motherfucker put a trigger warning on that shit

YouTube does this. Infuriating well beyond mild.

Deepl is vastly superior to Translate btw
Edit - look at these knobends 👇
This is what's wrong with the internet now, some wank coming up with a massively niche reason why every comment is wrong.
Use a mix of both you insufferable fucking plonkers
- Seems cool, but it's currently missing some pretty important languages (Hindi, Urdu, Thai, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Swahili, etc). I'd put up with something limited like this if it was FOSS and/or selfhostable but it appears not to be

People have been complaining about this for a long time https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=613804

Anyone know of a good modern extension for this?

Go to about:config and set "browser.navigation.requireUserInteraction" to true

You can right click (long press on mobile) to skip back to the page that took you there

This is why I have dozens, if not hundreds of tabs open. Usually I open links in a new tab so I can easily tab back to where I came from. Using a hierarchical tab manager makes this work better because when you're done with the topic, you close the whole branch... theoretically.

This tactic also seems targeted at mobile users where it's harder to break the loop.

if you're into college ball check out our cfb community: !cfb@fanaticus.social

is there by any chance like a ublock filter specific for this?

Press and hold the back button. A lot of times this will show a history where you can select a page further back.

Looks to me like that's what this screenshot is of.

You can stop this by changing the settings in your browser. In Firefox go to about:config and search for browser.navigation.requireUserInteraction and toggle it so that it says true.

Not sure about that site specifically, but others that's done it to me was easy to get around. Most of them are thwarted with basically double clicking the back button.