Google to penalize “back button hijacking” starting June 2026
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijackingOpen linkView original on mander.xyz383
Comments49https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijackingOpen linkView original on mander.xyz
Hell yeah. Too many news sites being you to their main page when you hit the back button.
I didn't know this kind of thing was possible until recently. I straight up couldn't leave a site because of hijacking.
I almost never encounter it anymore because I habitually just open a new tab for everything. A habit I started doing because encountering it made me so angry I almost swore off computers altogether
Super niche adjacent rage but shoutout to max-for-live developers who implement their Ableton plugins as a series of user actions so that the instant you touch the plugin it detonates your entire undo history
long click on the "back button" will list the history of the tab you'll be able to select the search history
(ay least on Firefox)
Or right-click.
Unless the site also spams the history to fill that list so that you can't use it. Yes, I've seen that happen.
for those you just close the tab and never visit it again!
Unfortunately, so called legit sites do this shit now too. So you may find government, school, or work forcing you to interact with asshats like this.
RIP to the Microsoft support forums, then. Although if these get tanked in the search results that will probably be a small net benefit for society given that not a single problem has ever been successfully solved by the Microsoft support forums in the entire history of computing.
Bro you just need to run sfc /scannow one more time. Just trust me bro
That didn't work? Did you reinstall yet?
I’m a Microsoft MVP.
I don’t reboot my computer I just reformat and reinstall every time I start it.
How do you even get past the billion banners before the end of the day?
"I am an independent contractor and technical MVP in whatever and am happy to help."
They could always go back to compliance with web standards and abandon their shitty Javascript bullshit.
Haha. Just kidding, they'd never do anything that sensible.
This is almost as annoying as websites disabling right click (there is an extension that re-enables it on command though)
And sites handling every link with JavaScript, making Ctrl - click to open in a new tab impossible
Fuck all sites that break basic browser functions
To nitpick for nitpicking’s sake: You can make Ctrl+Click work in JS.
Or disabling paste in password and bank account fields. Which is a literal crime in the US but never enforced.
God I hate when apps don’t have properly marked fields. You can mark your fields as username/password/street address/phone number/etc and browsers will automatically be able to detect them. So they can suggest autofill for the respective fields. But so many sites just… Refuse to properly mark their fields?
I know autofill hijacking was a problem for a while. For instance, a malicious ad could have off-screen autofill fields. So your browser would autofill them and the ad would capture the data. It was super scummy, and is why browsers moved towards prompting for autofill instead of just doing it automatically. But this is no excuse for sites to break paste on their own fields. It adds nothing to security, and only encourages weak passwords.
You can hold shift to ignore a site's hook for that.
Wait.... This sounds... Good?
That can't be right, this is 2026, we cannot possibly be watching a tech company do an actual good thing.
They didn't even shove AI in there. This has gotta be fake, right?
It's so you can go back to Google search and view more of their ads.
I checked the date in case it was an April fool.
Why weren't they going after this 10 years ago? I think I've just gotten into the habit of "open in new tab" because I know there's a good chance "back" won't do what I want.
Frankly, here on PieFed, "back" to a feed isn't very useful, because you'll just land somewhere in the feed, not back to the place where you started. "Open in new tab" solves that as well, for certain very small values of "solves."
oh shit I thought that was just a brave/tablet problem on Lemmy. It's definitely mildly infuriating to have been moved down half the feed when hitting back, thought the browser was recognizing I was halfway down a comment section or something so it was registering the movement when I went back or something. On PC I just do new tabs (habit) like you said so I never notice it.
I bet this happens because when you go back, there's some new posts at the top, so e.g. "page 2" is now a bit shifted compared to where it was before.
-- Frost
I remember a long time ago complaining about a shitty pattern like this (specifically, bombing your history by artificially making a shitload of redirects and thus making the back button useless. Probably the old school way to do this shit). Back then I was told by web devs "this is how the web works, you can't have a browser detect and block this!".
Fuck that.
Nope. The old-school way to do it worked perfectly and didn't do any of that crap.
That doesn't sound like a web developer but like a web destroyer.
Well it's about time they do something impact full and useful. This would be a useful thing I think
☞ impactful
☞ use full
This isnt help full
Honestly good move. While i never get redirected, most i get is website begging for click. "Are u leavin? Plz don't leave, here's mor articl you might be interested with" no thanks and fuck you.
While they're at it, could they please also penalize Android app developers who do this too?
I have successfully taught my children that if they play a game that requires ads between attempts at playing the game, that usually is faster to force close the game and start from the beginning again than wait for the ad to finish.
I'm so proud to see them just "nope" out of ads immediately.
Good practice, but consider putting something like Dnsnet on the phone to fully block all ads:
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.clombardo.dnsnet
It starts a small "VPN" client that will filter incoming/outgoing traffic for any add content and kill it before it gets sent. Its free and works great on any android device, rooted or not.
I have a pi-hole at home to block them when they're on Wi-Fi. I'll look into that for when they're out and about
Toss nextdns.io into the mix if you have technical chops. Its a great way to filter ads at the DNS level that is also free. I use that in my pi hole setup as the DNS to just layer and layer on more filtering.
Sponsorblock is also great for things that YouTube videos to filter out ad reads/self promo/etc in YouTube videos.
I for one would like to take a moment to enjoy this small win and bask in the idea of there being actual improvements in technology.
Who the fuck added this "feature" anyways. Pages shouldn't have any control over history in the first place.
Humans are weird and UX wants the web app to behave how humans expect it to behave. That's how we got here. There's a whole host of reasons why manipulating browser history is awful, but here we are.
Coming from the creator of a search engine that does "anchor hijacking" where it sends a request about what link you click even if you hover over the link and only see the original URL in the bottom.
A lot of online tests are going to get a lot easier, hehe
Yesssss, broken clock theorem at work
Rare Google W.
Wait this is a generic web thing? Or limited to google chrome? I got confused
This is about Google Search specifically.
Sucks