Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Back button hijacking
Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 11 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 16 complaints
- Hijacked shortcuts block F12, forcing users to dig through the browser menu2026-04-14
- Back button history fills with repeated links, making it hard to return to the real previous page2026-04-14
- Pressing back sends user to an unwanted feed page instead of the previous page2026-04-14
- Sites intercept Ctrl+F, so the browser's page search doesn't work as expected2026-04-14
- Browser back button is hijacked, so it leaves the app or jumps to the front page2026-04-14
- Single-page apps break browser Back, so users can't return to the view they came from2026-04-14
- Back button steps through menu opens and tab clicks instead of leaving the page2025-03-13
- Has to press back about 30 times to return to a thread2024-10-07
- Back button returns to unexpected place instead of where the user started2022-07-10
- Clicking the back button shows an unwanted spam page instead of going back2022-04-09
- Back button stops working, so users can't return to the previous page2018-06-27
- Back button is valueless and problematic in single-page apps2017-01-05
- Sites can disable the back button, so users cannot easily leave the page2016-05-21
- Back button behaves poorly during discovery, despite history API effort2013-04-23
- Back button doubles as up button, confusing the user and making it useless2012-01-26
- Back button is slow and not as easy to use as closing tabs2010-05-23