14 DAY TRIAL // As the world’s number one browser, Google Chrome is constantly evolving, with Google always looking into ways to improve usability, security, and performance on all platforms.
More recently, Google has started working on a new feature that will prevent websites from taking over the back button in Chromium.
As many users found out the hard way, there are pages out there that make the back button in the browser pretty much useless, simply because they don’t want you to leave. Pressing the back button on such a website has no effect, as the browser just seems to be stuck on the same page.
This is a gimmick that takes advantage of the way the back button works in browsers and uses either redirects or history manipulation.
How to hijack the back button
The first method comes down to a page that serves as a permanent redirector, so even if you click back, it reloads the page that you’re supposed to be stuck with. The second uses the browsing history, which the back button relies on to let you return to a previous page, by tricking it to stop another page from loading.
“Some pages makes it difficult or impossible for the user to go back to the page they came from via the browser back button. This is accomplished by redirects or by manipulating the browser history and results in an abusive/annoying user experience,” Google explains in a recent commit noticed by Sophos.
Google will resolve this problem by blocking any behavior that doesn’t involve user input, which means that pressing the back button will have the expected outcome and not allow tricky code to intervene.
“The new behavior of the browser’s back button will be to skip over pages that added history entries or redirected the user without ever getting a user gesture. Note that the intervention only impacts the browser back/forward button UI and not the history.back/forward APIs,” Google says.
The feature is still in the works and will be available on all platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS.