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When I intentionally want to read something that is what I do. However once in a while I'm scrolling, selecting a window, or some other activity; and I happen to click on a link: instead of whatever action I intended I end up on a new page I didn't want to read (maybe I will want to read it, but I haven't go far enough cognitively to realize that). That is when I want my back button to work - a get out of here back to where I was.
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Exactly, it has the potential to make you lose something important, forcing you to dig through browser history to find it again. If it happens to be a long-lived tab, you might be searching for a while if you forgot the name or site you were on.
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given the level of hostility most businesses have towards their customers, we should probably be opening links in disposable virtual machines
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Or just log all cookies and other localstorage against the domain of the top-level window.location which would achieve most of what a VM would with much lower overhead.

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.

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I have always done this, although mostly so I don’t have to reload the page I am coming from when I hit the back button.
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>I've taken to opening anything in a new tab.

this is the way.

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This is the way. People think I am eccentric for the number of tabs I keep open.
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I do that everywhere, but it seems to fail for LinkedIn: they don’t redirect the link if it’s not in the same tab.
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Bad design on their part, another reason not to revisit! If a site breaks my workflow I generally stop using the site, rather than changing my workflow.

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.

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> Closing the tab is my new back button.

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

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