
In November, Chromium’s developers took up the mantle and pledged to fix the problem.

WICG is a forum for discussing how to improve the web experience for users. Participants in the Web Incubator Community Chapter (WICG) first identified this in 2016. The result? You either click madly on the back button to get back through the stack faster than the site can update it, or you just give up and close the window. It can pile these dummy entries pointing to itself on top of the stack. HTML5 allows a nuisance web page to hijack that process by adding entries to the session history using the pushState command. When you press the back button on your browser, it goes to the last page in that stack. Your browser keeps a stack of records showing which pages you’ve visited in the current window’s session. But no, nuisance websites ruin everything, including history. Or going back to 1990 and putting all your money into Cisco shares (you’d be worth over $1.3m today on a $1000 initial investment). It sounds fun, like playing heavy metal for fifties high school kids in Back to the Future. When you hit the back button your browser goes back one URL in its history, which loads the redirect which bounces you forwards again. Redirects are simple – on the way in you’re bounced through a redirect you don’t notice that sits in your browser history between the page you started on and the page you’re on now. They achieve their nefarious goals in two ways: using redirects or history manipulation. Once you stumble into their dark corner of the internet and try to leave, they hijack your browser’s back button, blocking the exit. These sites are the Roach Motels of the web: you can check in, but you can’t check out. Your Chrome back button sometimes fails because of sneaky behaviour by nuisance websites. Or more accurately, the developers behind the Chromium open source browser that underpins Chrome will soon have a fix for you.

If you’ve ever found the back button on your Chrome browser not working, Google will soon have a fix for you.
