Also www.reddit.com is/was doing the same back button hijacking.
From google.com visiting a post, then clicking back and you would find yourself on Reddit general feed instead of back to Google.
I'm pretty sure what you're describing is this long-standing bug[1] I've experienced only when using Mobile Safari on Reddit - affecting both old.reddit.com and the (horrible) modern Reddit. It just doesn't happen in other browsers/engines except on iOS. It's especially annoying on an iPad when I tend to use back/forward instead of open-in-new-tab-then-close on iPhone.
Even manually typing reddit.com/r/all (or r/All, which was a workaround for a while) in the address bar on iOS Safari redirects you to reddit.com/. Since I'm guessing you're not browsing reddit.com, what client are you using?
I'm not sure what exact device you're using, but on iPhone 12 Mini, old.reddit.com is borderline unusable, very different experience compared to if you could access r/all like before via the actually usable web+mobile version, a comparison: https://imgur.com/a/AVGjjCN
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.
I'm using an iphone 13, although I prefer to turn sideways and browse in landscape mode. What you consider borderline unusable is just how I prefer to browse reddit.
“Borderline unusable” is such a hyperbolic way to describe a fully functional design that doesn’t happen to be responsive. Hacker News must be borderline unusable for you as well then, no?
> Hacker News must be borderline unusable for you as well then, no?
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.
Is that a ios browser difference? I browse hn all the time on my android phone and I didn't think my screen was unusually big. Maybe they implement some different scaling?
I almost solely use HN on my iPhone browser. It works very well and the scaling is well implemented, although it is a little too easy to accidentally fat finger and vote/flag something without realizing it. I actually find the desktop site (on my laptop) to be a bit hard to use due to its narrowness and small font size, but I'm not sure how universal that is.
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.
For mobile Safari on iOS/iPad, the back button imo is just completely broken. It’s either a bug, or Apple might say I’m ‘holding it wrong’.
One version it just stopped doing its one job correctly and it’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:
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.
I would just like to point out that this was one of the things that the AMP straightjacket prevented. The whole online news industry has conclusively demonstrated that it can't be trusted with javascript and must be hospitalized, but they refuse to acknowledge their own illness.
Yeah, and I think it's pretty much impossible to solve.
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.
Sounds like maybe some prevention against this is already implemented in either particular Android browsers, or ad blockers, maybe even for specific sites?
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
My understanding is that Apple keeps Safari fairly broken and doesn't care to implement the Googleverse and leaves a lot of things E_WONTFIX. I have read speculation that broken Safari encourages apps in the App Store.
hm yeah but the History API is not new or exclusive to Google, also my understanding was that the discussion is about the annoyance "working" on iOS Safari, but not on other platforms. Any way, too many variables here.
Even on old.reddit, it breaks the back button. When you navigate back, it usually reloads the entire page you were on and ignores all your collapse actions on conversations.
Look at https://mastra.ai/ and https://www.copilotkit.ai/ to see how more inviting their pages look.
A company is not selling only the product itself but all the other things around the product = THE WHOLE PRODUCT
A similar concept in developer tools is the docs are the product
Also I'm a fullstack javascript engineer and I don't use Python.
Docs usually have a switch for the language at the top.
Stripe.com is famous for it's docs and Developer Experience:
https://docs.stripe.com/search#examples
It's great to study other great products to get inspiration and copy the best traits that are relevant to your product as well.
I actually didn't notice since there weren't gradients.
On one side what you are saying it's true but on the other side it rings like "it was better when it was worse" which I always despised in the past.
It's hard to accept when it's your own craft that is being automated but we must move on. Otherwise we'll be like the mechnical clockmakers complaining about Casio watches.
No, this is absolutely just worse. The past wasn't all glory. There always were countless bad design patterns. But this is just bad. It's just the continuation of degenerative design principles that oppose information, functionality and control.
Yes it's awesome! I'm creating a lot of CLIs with Claude Code to interact with external services. Yesterday made a CLI for the Google Search Console so I can prompt "get all problems from indexing in Google Search Console and fix them".
Same with Sentry bugs. Same with the customer support "Use the the customer support cli skill to get recent conversations from customers and rank bug reporting and features requests and suggest things to work on"
Sentry MCP is great, “find out top 10 issues by users affected, check what it would take to fix and if you think it’s a low risk fix, apply it. Open a PR that links to the issues and explain the issue and the fix in three sentences max”.
The monorepo make it easier to ship the overall product but harder to ship parts of it.
I've used a monorepo for the past 13 years and I got all shared packages with version 0.0.0 and I still haven't figured out a simple way to share just some parts of it like a CLI.
Does anyone have a monorepo and publishes NPM packages with source code of only that folder? Sub-gits required to pull in multiple places...
that's true. Take care because in the YCombinator there is "Don't be snarky".
Ask yourself how you could have provided the same useful insight without being snarky:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't see anything snarky about their comment. That rule is for cases where people are overly sarcastic and argumentative, not for comments like the above.
snarky
critical or mocking in an indirect or sarcastic way.
I think the constructive information is mentioning Github Pages were built on .md file and they have existed for 10 years. That's true and useful.
The snarky part happens when phrasing the sentence "Ah you guys only doing this now? It has existed for 10 years" that part is talking about something constructive but it's also trying to diminish the discovery of someone else.
We all find and develop at different times. In general is better to be constructive and happy someone else is joining you in using something than underline how it was already done in some way by you or others and this new discovery is irrelevant. Everything that exists already existed (in some other shape or smaller parts).
I disagree. Sometimes it’s useful to point out dumb things. As long as it’s not cruel. I think being efficient in speech is helpful and no need to be constructive with silly or damaging comments.
I don’t think this is a case of just finding something late, it’s finding something decades after it’s very common. And strange that the author didn’t reference this old practice.
I don’t think my comment is any snarkier than yours.
My intent wasn’t snark, but more incredulity at how the post was written and how it states some very old, commonly accepted best practice was novel or finally time to use.
I’d make a similar comment if someone posted that now is the time to use object oriented programming. And I wouldn’t do so in a snarky way.
