Sometimes, when I navigate to a link on a web page, when I try to navigate back, either by clicking on the back-arrow button (top left) or pressing Atl+Left, the browser refuses to return me from whence I came. Sometimes, if I click “Back” two or three times quickly, it will work, other times, nothing seems to work.
Hovering the mouse pointer over the Back button shows that IE “knows” where that button is supposed to take me, but it just doesn’t.
I’m not talking about various web sites that don’t want you to leave the page you’re on; usually a double-click on the Back button usually works for that. I just saw this behavior while browsing in The Straight Dope Message Board – clicked on a topic, read through it, hit the Back button, nothing.
I get the same thing on my personal laptop at home and my computer at work.
Anybody ever hear of this? Anybody experience this? Anybody know how to make it quit when it starts? (So far, closing the Tab and reopening it seems to work, but if I had to follow a winding path to get there, it can be a chore to get back.)
Without going into the reasons it happens, your workaround is to right click on the back button, which brings up a popup menu of the pages you’ve been on recently so that you can choose one of them, and back up more than one page. I confirmed this in IE 11, I don’t have 10 installed. However, this is pretty much standard behavior on all browsers I know of.
Sometimes ads will interfere with the back button by “populating” it in roughly the same way the web sites you mention do, so that you just keep ending up where you are. Easiest way to deal with it is to click-and-hold on the back button, which will pop up your recent history, and you can skip down past the scam ones to “really” go back.
Technologically related to ads, you’ll find some website content management software that puts a jump link between where you think you came from and where you are. So if you go back one hop, you’re not really going back to what you think of is the source of the link, only back to a content-free jump page that immediately redirects back to the page you’re trying to leave. It can happen so fast you’re not aware of the back-and-forth.
Modern web content design has pretty much destroyed the reliability of the “back” button on a browser. So much for the principle of least astonishment. :mad: (When you design a user-facing computer system, you should design your user interactions to not astonish the user when they take an action. In this case, if the button says “back” it should take them back to the last page they were aware of, not some invisible jump page that will just punt them forward again.)