“Back” Means “Back,” Not “Before You Leave”

You know what really grinds my gears? News websites that hijack your web browser’s “Back” button to show you clickbait before sending you back where you came from, which is what the “Back” button is supposed to do.

In a past life, I wrote software documentation. It was dull, boring, and nobody ever read my work, because who reads the instructions? But one thing I learned was how important it was to document procedures clearly and consistently. Every button in a user interface has a specific function. Normally, it only has one function. If that function does change based on the context of what you’re trying to do, it needs to make sense and be clear about what it’s doing, and why, to not upset the user.

That was in the days before enshittification took over. (That’s a real word now. It’s in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.) Now, nothing is sacred, especially if there’s a buck to be made, even, or especially, at the user’s expense. Ever since Al Gore invented the internet (he never said that), a web browser’s “Back” button served one simple but important purpose. It would always take you back where you came from. If you’re searching for something and go astray, this allows you to retrace your steps and try another direction without starting all over again. It’s simple, it’s elegant, and it works.

But now, if you don’t find what you want at many news websites, clicking “Back” will bring up a new page, called “Before You Leave” or something like that, showing you a bunch of other articles in a desperate attempt to keep you on that website so they can keep getting clicks, and therefore money. It never works, never shows you anything remotely relevant to anything you’re actually looking for, and only annoys the user by corrupting the “Back” button’s legitimate purpose.

I spend hours each day searching for and researching articles for Jalopnik. Every day, news websites waste my time by throwing irrelevant content at me instead of allowing my web browser to function as designed and take me back where I came from. Every time this happens, my frustration grows, and gets to a point where I have to be the old man yelling at a cloud because someone on the internet is wrong. So I wrote a rant here. You can choose to read it, or not, as you wish. However, at this point, I’m afraid it’s too late, since if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve already read it. I hope I haven’t wasted your time in the same way the “Before You Leave” pages do.