I wish that the back button would send me back to the page + page position that I was on when I (the user) clicked a link or entered a form. I’ve never had a desire to revisit automatic redirect pages, so imo default behaviour should be to send the user back to the point of the previous user action. To me this seems easy and logical to implement, but I’ve never seen it, so maybe I’m missing something and it’s not that easy.
That sounds like default behaviour, at least in Firefox, if a websites loaded as a static page and doesn’t dynamically load its content after page load.
Since they mentioned redirect, I think they take an issue with the scenario of ‘click → more pages load and redirect you after each load → back’ that will repeatedly land you on just the last redirect page and then promptly redirect you forward to the newest page you tried to go back from
If it’s default behaviour for static pages, but not for dynamic pages, then it’s not much of a default. As a user I want ui actions to be consistent, the unknown stuff that happens in the background shouldn’t change the behaviour of the ui. Firefox now mostly gets around this issue by opening search engine links in new tabs (I can’t recall if that’s standard for Firefox or if I had to change settings, but I’ve been using it for years like that), but this wouldn’t have been needed if using the back button was reliable.
I wish that the back button would send me back to the page + page position that I was on when I (the user) clicked a link or entered a form. I’ve never had a desire to revisit automatic redirect pages, so imo default behaviour should be to send the user back to the point of the previous user action. To me this seems easy and logical to implement, but I’ve never seen it, so maybe I’m missing something and it’s not that easy.
That sounds like default behaviour, at least in Firefox, if a websites loaded as a static page and doesn’t dynamically load its content after page load.
Since they mentioned redirect, I think they take an issue with the scenario of ‘click → more pages load and redirect you after each load → back’ that will repeatedly land you on just the last redirect page and then promptly redirect you forward to the newest page you tried to go back from
If it’s default behaviour for static pages, but not for dynamic pages, then it’s not much of a default. As a user I want ui actions to be consistent, the unknown stuff that happens in the background shouldn’t change the behaviour of the ui. Firefox now mostly gets around this issue by opening search engine links in new tabs (I can’t recall if that’s standard for Firefox or if I had to change settings, but I’ve been using it for years like that), but this wouldn’t have been needed if using the back button was reliable.
I found this 2022-2024 discussion with a few examples of the back button not working as expected: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/firefox-needs-to-do-something-about-back-button-history-loading/td-p/4678
I found no announcements of a fix. I also haven’t had much occasion of noticing a fix, since new pages open in a separate tab for me.