Chrome To Combat Sticky 'Back Button' Websites

Google is to fight back against websites that make it deliberately hard for users to leave their pages. It's tweaking the way the Chrome browser responds to the back button.

The back button sounds like something simple that would intuitive take the user to the page they were on before navigating to the current page. However, the way it works has proven open to abuse.

In reality the back button doesn't reverse the most recent "move" between pages. Instead it tells the browser to visit the most recent page in its history list. To the user it makes no difference, but to the browser it's effectively a new page visit.

Backtracking Not Always Easy

The problem is that sneaky websites take advantage by creating bogus browser history entries. They're usually set in a cycle that means pressing back actually takes the user to a bogus page that simply redirects them to the page they were trying to leave.

To make things worse, this happens almost instantaneously and users have no way of knowing how long the list of bogus entries is (or that it actually exists). That means they have to guess how many times to hit the back button and will often click too few times and be stuck on the unwanted page, or too many times and have to retrace their steps to find the page they actually wanted to return to. (Source: express.co.uk)

Bogus Pages Could Be Skipped

Google believes it has figured out a way to identify bogus entries in the browser history. To start with, it will flag the pages associated with the bogus entries and send the data for analysis.

It will look for evidence that the bogus entries are indeed being used to abuse the back button, which could include cases where the user "visits" the same page multiple times in short succession.

Once it's confident a site is indeed manipulating the browser history, it will simply tell Chrome to skip the flagged entries when finding the most recently visited page. That should make the back button work as designed.

The changes have been added to Chromium, the underlying code that Chrome is based on. It should soon arrive in the advance testing program before eventually being rolled out to all users. (Source: 9to5google.com)

What's Your Opinion?

Have you experienced problems with the back button? Does this sound like a smart way to overcome such tricks? Do you think the shady sites will simply find another way to manipulate browsing?