[1] At least, I hope it's a bug.
Anyways, the end result has been I don't use reddit at all on the phone, so kind of ended up being good for me anyways.
On my phone? Yes, absolutely, impossible to hit the links correctly even if I zoom in. Both old reddit and HN is "Fully functional" on desktop, agree, but far cry from "fully functional" on my arguably tiny iPhone.
it's dead, per official comment from reddit.
You and I are very different Reddit users. I don't think I've even seen r/all for at least a decade. I exclusively view Reddit via the old.reddit.com URL in desktop mode with the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on + uBO + a custom CSS theme. I'm automatically redirected to my 'Subscribed' page showing only the dozen or so niche subreddits I care about, none of which have more than 100k subscribers (most are under 25k). It's glorious... like a time machine to before Reddit enshittified itself and spammers, astro-turfers, shills and influencers took over.
Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab. (???)
Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.
The issue is hardly isolated to news outlets. It's endemic to the web.
Look what happened with Netflix. They actually got it right, a reasonable price for a bunch of stuff which would end up appropriated based on demand (they needed to have the disk to rent.) And how you have a bunch of players trying to compete in the space, each with it's exclusive content to try to make you choose them.
And look what's happened with Google's "news". It's more and more and more clickbait. I used to think the answer was a small charge per article, run through some aggregator that tracked payment. But these days we see things designed to get you to open the page, not to actually provide value. Or look at the problems Amazon has had with it's Kindle Unlimited stuff--books designed to game the metrics, groups engaging in read each other's books behavior etc.
Just speculating, I can't imagine a reason why they'd implement this especially for Safari.
Other than A/B-testing or trash code that coincidentally doesn't work in all mobile browsers.
Maybe they use the same AI that generates their fictious relationship stories to add these dark patterns to their code base :D
New spam policy for navigate-away blocking, hope that's Google's next article.
I've taken to opening anything in a new tab. Closing the tab is my new back button. In an idea world I shouldn't have to, of course, but we live in a world full of disks implementing dark patterns so not an ideal one. Opening in a new tab also helps me apply a “do I really care enough to give this reading time?” filter as my browsers are set to not give new tabs focus - if I've not actually looked at that tab after a little time it gets closed without me giving it any attention at all.
Specifically regarding LinkedIn and their family of dark patterns, I possibly should log in and update my status after the recent buy-out. I've not been there since updating my profile after the last change of corporate overlords ~9 years ago. Or I might just log in and close my profile entirely…
The only problem is that this would break some things like certain SSO systems, so you would have to implement a white-list to allow shared state, and the UX for that would be abused to nag users to whitelist everything. Most people would just click “OK” by default like they do with everything else, and those of us with more sense would have a new reason to be irritated by incessant nagging.
this is the way.
Though I'm guessing it would work in the cases being discussed in this article & thread: when you are navigating into a site (such as linkedin) from another, rather than following internal links.
In Safari if you open a new tab, don't navigate anywhere, and click back, the tab closes and takes you back to the originating page. I've gottent so used to it, I now miss it in any other browser
Thanks for explaining how they do it BTW! I didn't really think about it. I just knew it was shitty.
Assume the way that universal links work, is that the site main page is loaded, and some hash is supplied, indicating the page to navigate to from there. That's annoying, but perfectly valid, and may be necessary for sites that establish some kind of context baseline from their landing page.
It’s like reading an eBook in a reader. You always use the reader to interpret, format, and present the data.
It kind of sticks a spike into the old “each page is a document” model.
I remember when JavaScript became a big Web site driver. The arguments against using it to fetch and build content usually included broken back button functionality.
I don’t think a lot of folks really paid much attention to it, though.
The option I chose was "profile data" because I wanted to get my whole work history/projects/etc. for a new resume.
The export took several hours.
When I finally downloaded it, it included my name, Email, short description, and my Email address...
God I hope you are being funny. Why else would anyone install this crap?
It doesn't solve the problem with Instagram links, which in my experience do the following:
1) Open a new browser tab, with no history. 2) Close the original tab, so I can't easily get back to where I was.
That's not a fix the user can implement themselves. Holding down the back button is comparatively trivial.
Clicking "back", noticing that the site broke it, moving the mouse and long-pressing "back" (I normally navigate with a mouse thumb button or a trackpad gesture) is much more annoying than my browser just preventing this from happening in the first place.
One conception is "take me back to the previous screen I was on", one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.
Mac Finder is a perfect example of a program correctly implementing the two. If you're deep in some folder and then press cmd+win+l to go to ~/Downloads, cmd+up will get you to ~/, but cmd+[ will get you back to where you were before, even if this was deep in some network drive, nowhere near ~.
I feel like mobile OSes lean towards "one level up" as the default behavior, while traditional desktop OSes lean more towards tracking your exact path and letting you go back.
Browsers actually used to have hierarchical navigation support, with buttons and all, back in the age of dinosaurs - all one had to do is to set up some meta tags in HTML head section to tell which URL is "prev"/"next"/"up". Alas, this has proven too difficult for web developers, who eventually even forgot web was meant for documents at all, and at some point browsers just hid/removed those buttons since no one was using them anyway.
The "Back" remains, and as 'Arainach wrote, it's only one concept and it's not, and never has been "up one level in the hierarchy".
EDIT:
The accepted/expected standard way for "take me up one level in hierarchy" on the web is for the page itself to display the hierarchy e.g. as breadcrumbs. The standard way to go to top level of the page is through a clickable logo of the page/brand. Neither of those need, or should, involve changing behavior of browser controls.
In web browsers, there is only one concept.
There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-move-up-one-url-level-in-chrom... *shrug*
This statement makes no sense to non-tech people. Most people don't think of sites hierarchically, at least not from a url path perspective.
Going from an image to a root domain is not a hierarchy and as a pathological data hoarder who has downloaded a lot of images from a lot of sites I don't understand why I'd ever want that feature. It's wild that that's their first example use case on the article.
Similarly, going from page N of results to page 1 isn't "up a level in heirarchy".
*Edit - I left this in the wrong place, those extensions behave slightly differently.
Who expects this behavior? It doesn't make sense. You just want to go back where you were. Most file browsers I've used wanting to implement going up a level in hierarchy, have an arrow pointing up.
For example, the Bacula documentation is still online, as a prime example of this: https://www.bacula.org/9.6.x-manuals/en/main/Getting_Started...