Giving me back my back button!

It is somewhat unfortunate that I start the year on my blog by posting a rant but here I go anyway.

I’m getting tired of all the websites that make the “back button” of my browser useless.

And when I say “button” I really just mean “back function”, because I actually seldom use the mouse and favor key strokes in many cases. So, in reality I typically hit the “page back” button on my keyboard or Alt-left arrow key when I’m on a keyboard that doesn’t have that key.

But that doesn’t really matter, whichever way I actually do it, I expect this action to get me back to the page I was previously on, just before I followed some link that led me to the page I’m looking at now.

Unfortunately, more often than not nowadays this action leads me to the wrong page. That is I typically land on some page I visited before but not the previous one. This obviously makes using the back function of my browser useless.

Sadly this problem seems to be a common characteristic of modern websites, such as Facebook or Picasa just to name a couple, that provide their own navigation mechanism which screws up the history the browser relies on for its back function.

Every time I mention that to my friend Andy who writes javascript for a living he says: “ah, yes, keeping the history straight is tough.” Well, I don’t care whether this is tough or not, website developers need to understand that this is something they need to worry about and get right.