It’s a problem people sometimes run into. If they press the back button on Google Chrome on certain sites, nothing happens. Instead, they end up on the same page where they started. Google is currently working on a solution for this.
The site 9to5Google reports that it found a new commit in Chromium. It says they intend to do something about this annoying situation. You can read in the commit that it will no longer be possible to force a user in this way to stay on a site.
Manipulating browsing history
The back button in Google Chrome uses the browsing history. Together with the cross above the tab, it is the most commonly used method for users to leave a site. But some sites don’t want their users to leave. That’s why they mess around with the history of the browse.
It’s not very complicated to do that. The site Ars Technica explains it clearly. Imagine that you are browsing through Google’s search results to the site example1.com. This contains an automatic referral to example2.com. That means both pages are in your browsing history. If you then press the back button, you will arrive at example1.com, which will automatically redirect you to example1.com. It’s not impossible to leave (press the back button twice very quickly and you’ve already arranged it), but it’s more difficult.
To do something about this, Google adds a skippable flag to the browsing history. This means that the return button will mark certain previously visited sites as irrelevant. To do this, Google will have to figure out when it can designate a site as irrelevant. Probably it uses the time when a site was visited. After all, if you’re not on a site for a second, that’s probably not a good thing.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.