I have come across a few web sites that [ul]
[li] Disable your back button[/li][li] Mess with your history[/li][li] Automatically add themselves to your favorites[/li][/ul]
So… [list]
[li] Are these problems only with IE?[/li][li] Why would a browser let a web page do these things? (Besides the standard ‘microsoft is evil’ answer)[/li] Any way to prevent this from happening?
I use Netscape and I’ve seen sites that disable the “back” button, but not the others. Try disabling Java. I usually leave Java and Javascript turned off. It definitely stops sites from opening new windows, and gets rid of that floating Geocities menu and watermark. Next time I see a site that messes with the toolbar, I’ll check and see if I have Java on.
They are probably java scripts. You can disable java scripts with the Internet setup. I never found any sites that do list of things you said except the history one. But there are plenty of ways to go back to a page besides just using history.
I’ve been wondering about the sites (like washingtonpost.com) that somehow disable you from selecting text (so you can’t copy their text). The way around it is to use their built-in function to e-mail the article to yourself, and you can copy & paste from there (with the annoyance of having to edit out all the line breaks).
Another curious disablement I’ve seen on one site is they disable your right mouse button! So you can’t grab any of their pictures! Is there any way around that? How do they do it?
Yes. Use the View Source option in your browser to see the HTML code. All text and image links will be in the HTML code. You can then cut and paste the text or use a direct link to the image.
I’m not sure how they do that. I went to their site without javascript, and I still couldn’t copy text.
I don’t know what kind of computer you are using, but on a windows-based PC you can hit the “print screen” key and it will copy a snapshot of your desktop to the clipboard. You can then go in any graphics program (even the paint program that comes with Windows will work) and paste it as a new image. Crop and save, and your done.
Another way would be to look around in your browser’s cache for it. There may be thousands of images in there and they don’t have descriptive names, so you will have to open each one to find the one you want. 
To make it easier, clear out your cache and reload the page. Also, some graphics programs can display thumbnails of all the images in a directory.
Viewing your cache:
On Netscape, entering the location “about:cache” will show you the cache entries and the original URL’s that produced them.
regarding “disabling” the back button:
They aren’t really disabling it exactly, they’re just kind of tricking it. When you hit the back cutton, the same page will load. An easy workaround: See the little down arrow that is between your back and forward buttons? click that. Then select the SECOND item in your list. This is the same as clicking the back button on sites that aren’t using these “dirty tricks”.
I know about that trick, I thought the OP was talking about sites that will remove the entire toolbar from your browser.
We have tossed around the idea of doing that with our software. Most sites that I know of that do this – it isn’t because they are doing this to be malicious or to cause you any grief. It has to do with sessions and storing changes that you make from one page to the next when using a wizard or some other tool that requires several screens of data entry. Many times these will just not work when users make use of the back and forward buttons on the IE Toolbar. All the cases I know about where they take away your toolbar, they provide back and forward buttons through the GUI, which allows you to move about.
Taking a look at a Washington Post article, it appears that they enclosed the text of the article in <nitf> tags. Anyone have any idea what those tags are supposed to do, and if that’s the explanation? I note that the effect occurs even on a really old browser (Netscape 3.0 Gold), and without any sort of scripting enabled.
The printer-friendly option also seems to get around this difficulty.
<NITF> tags are nothing to do with this, unfortunately. NITF is the News Industry Text Format, an attempt at an industry-standard set of XML tags for describing news documents ( more here ).
Can anyone give me a link to a Washington Post article with this “anti-copy” feature? All the ones I looked at copied and pasted just fine.
Some thoughts:
[ul][li]Removing the toolbar is A Bad Thing[sup]TM[/sup] from a usability point of view, since it inevitable confuses and frustrates surfers accustomed to the buttons. However, as mouthbreather said, there are times where it might be useful. For example, I use an online banking site where my password entry and account details are displayed in a pop-up without the toolbars. If I was in an internet cafe, nobody else could move “back” to see my details once I’ve shut that window down.[/li]
[li]Some unscrupulous (usually porn) sites use it as a way to frustrate surfers into handing over credit card details. This is a development of the common practice of using the back button redirections in the OP to trap people until they hand over money. The practice is called circle jerking, and there’s a very good article here: Salon: Pornutopia Lost.[/li]
[li]As for adding bookmarks automatically, I imagine it could be done with something similar to this (sorry if this is wrong, I know very little beyond vanilla HTML) when the page loads: ** onload = ‘window.external.AddFavorite(location.href,document.title);’**[/li]
Using View > Source is usually a foolproof way of viewing the text and images in a web page. The text will be directly copyable, and you can get the direct URLs for the images, type them into the address bar and then save the image that appears.[/ul]
I suspect the “back” button problem is not IE related.
If someone has a page like “www.abc.com” and they change their name to “www.def.com”, all the old links won’t work. So the simple fix is to put a page at the old page (abc.com) which has no visible effect, but redirects to the new page (def.com). When you hit “back” from def.com, it goes to abc.com, which redirects you back to def.com.
In IE, next to the “back” button is a small down-pointing arrow. If you click that, it will show a menu of recent pages. You can use it to select the page before abc.com.
Here is a page which disables the right click: http://www.taylorli.com/mainpage.htm If you look at the source code you can see a some java script which I believe does the trick. You can easily get around that. One way is to just find the images in the “temporary internet files” cache and copy them to your desktop. Load the page, sort the cache by “last accessed” and you’ll see them near the top.
I have not noticed washington post disabling the selection of text but I have seen it elsewhere. Again, just have a look at the source code: <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFDD" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#804020" ALINK="#FF0000" oncontextmenu=“return false” ondragstart=“return false” onselectstart=“return false”> Now someone can give us the details of what the last three do.
[QUOTE]
[li] Are these problems only with IE?[/li][/QUOTE]
No. Any browser that supports the Document Object Model will be suceptible to these problems in varying degrees. IE has the broadest support for the DOM, so it’s more easily exploited.
[QUOTE]
[li] Why would a browser let a web page do these things?[/li][/QUOTE]
Because it makes sense from a usability perspective. The DOM is a standard programming interface to the web pages and to a limited extent, their container - the browser. The more accessible the object, the easier it is to program. Software companies don’t gain support from the development community by LIMITING features. A programmer can do more when the object model is open, offering enhanced feature sets and applications. You’re only seeing the negative aspect of this openness.
[QUOTE]
[li] Any way to prevent this from happening?[/li][/QUOTE]
Yes. In a majority of the cases, Java is not the mechanism employed in these ‘tricks’. Javascript and VBscript are the culprits, particularly in generation 4+ browsers. If you don’t want your back button disabled, turn off scripting. The downside of this is that you lose a LOT of the enhanced usability other sites might provide in their pages.
The back button is one of those things that good developers never disable. From a programming perspective, there’s no reason to do it, except to trap your users. A good programmer doesn’t need to do it to maintain session state.
sailor:
[ul][li]onDragStart is the HTML event handler for starting to drag something (text, images) from the source.[/li]
[li]onContextMenu is the HTML event handler for the right mouse-button pop-up menu.[/li]
[li]onSelectStart is the HTML event handler for content selection (again, text, images etc) operations.[/ul][/li]In all three cases, returnfalse appears to be a dummy operation to prevent anything from happening (from the user’s point of view). You can still get round this by saving the source code using the browser toolbar, even if the right-click pop-up menu is disabled.
( All from the fantastic Index DOT Html website )
Try javascripts.com for free scripts that do amazing things.
Also, if you can’t cut & paste, under Nescape, select EDIT PAGE, then you can cut & paste from the page editor.
It would be cool if car manufacturers used this same logic…
Anachronism: What does this button on the fender do?
Salesman: I makes all the wheels fall off. Mechanics like it.
Anachronism: I see, but what if someone pushes it when I am stopped at a traffic light?
Salesman: All your wheels fall off.
Anachronism: Wouldn’t that be very inconvenient?
Salesman: Umm… Mechanics like it.
Anachronism: Can I turn it off?
Salesman: Of course.
Anachronism: Great
Salesman: But then your heat and air conditioning don’t work.
Anachronism ::Bangs head against wall::
Seriously, thanks for all the responses. Sometimes it may be the redirect thing as ThreeLeggedBob said, but I thought clicking the back button twice would skip past the redirect page, and that does not always work. Also I remember one page that had a pop-up dialog box that told you you couldn’t leave when you hit the back button.
Using the pulldown list next to the back button is a good idea, but if the site erases your history that won’t work either.
I’d like to see URLs to specific web pages that disable the Back button, mess with your toolbar, or prevent you from selecting and copying text. At the Washington Post site, I was able to copy in the articles I saw.
Also, at the page sailor mentioned, it pops up an about box in IE, but Opera behaves as usual.