Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Browser history
Raised as a usability problem by 22 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 21 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Can't find a page visited days ago in a huge historyUnreviewed
20102026- Difficult to retrieve previously visited pages because of poor UX2024-02-04
- Can't find previously visited pages that were never found via search engine2022-04-29
- Can't jump from a history search result back to its place in browsing sequence2021-05-10
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 23 complaints
- Back button returns to section start and then can't go further back2025-10-16
- History feels unreliable, and search and organising tools are weak2024-05-05
- Back button fails or goes somewhere unexpected after clicking intra-page links, forcing manual scrolling2024-03-11
- Difficult to retrieve previously visited pages because of poor UX2024-02-04
- Revisiting history entries doesn't restore the page state, and titles are useless2023-07-18
- Back button unpredictably breaks pages, shows confusing dialogs, or disables accounts2023-05-24
- Browser history fills with hundreds of entries; can't bulk-clear them on mobile2023-01-30
- Back button gets hijacked by sites and redirects, forcing many back presses to return2022-11-21
- Can't find previously visited pages that were never found via search engine2022-04-29
- Browser history is hard to use: one-page apps, pushState/replaceState and generic titles make it confusing2022-02-15
- History is linear, so you can't find tabs by the path you took to them2021-09-08
- Back button doesn't navigate the way the user expects when links open new tabs2021-05-10
- Can't jump from a history search result back to its place in browsing sequence2021-05-10
- Recovering a previously found page via history takes a long time, like finding a needle in a haystack2020-11-12
- History fills with useless pages, making the useful documentation hard to find2020-11-12
- Pressing back gets hijacked by ads or pages, so the user cannot return to the previous page2020-09-21
- History interface is poorly designed and hard to use for finding pages2019-01-06
- Finding a previously visited page requires clicking and waiting through each entry2018-07-25
- Can't find a page visited days ago; history is too large to sift through2017-01-30
- Back shows stale page data, forcing a manual refresh to see changes2016-09-21
- Each scroll adds a browser history entry, so back button needs many presses2015-07-06
- Browser back button does nothing, and history fills with many useless pages2011-10-16
- History search tends to never find the page the user wants2010-07-17