Replicated entries in the 'back' button on my browser

Occiasionally - well, all the time when I am using My Favorite Searches on EBay - I will click to a page and it will register multiple times, so that when I click ‘back’ it stays right there. When pulling down the ‘back’ menu, I can see the multiple ‘loadings’ of the same page.

This is evil. I assume it’s done deliberately to piss people off.

Can it be turned off, or automatically overridden somehow?

(using Firefox 1.0.7)

It could be ebay itself using some Javascript mechanism to prevent users from using the back-button.

Another likely explanation would be that ebay uses some redirection scripts. So when you press back, you hit the page with the redirection script so it got registered in your history. It may be the case of the redirection scripts toggling multiple times too.

While the above answer is a good one, I haven’t had that problem in Firefox 1.5.0.x (and probably earlier versions) I seem to recall that eBay was one of those site you can two-click (not the same as double clicking): if going back one icon hits a transfer page (sometimes almost an imperceptible pause) that lands you bac when you started, then you can back “over” that by clicking twice to get back to the page before the transfer before the tansfer ccan finish executing. YMMV, of course.

The “Back” drop down menu isn’t just a display, and can be used to jump several pages at once. Since it sounds like you already know that, and I do recall having some issues a while back I can only guess that later versions of FireFox (1.0.7 is over a year old) may handle this better. As I said, I didn’t have this problem on eBay in 1.5.0.x, which I used for many months. I haven’t used 2.0 long enough to definitively say the same for it, but it’s a good bet. It’s generally wise to use the latest version/security patch.

It could be that the initial link is running a redirect script to the page you actually get to. No good idea why they would want to do this, it’s probably just crappy coding.

Another detail that may affect your problem:

Last year, “enabling network pipelining” was being touted as a major browser speed up (it still is, but today there’s more “it depends” discussion). It occurs to me that I was having problems backing up past redirects on some sites at around the time that I had network pipelining turned on (Firefox default is ‘false’)

If you, too, may have changed that setting, try changing it back – type “about:config” (no spaces), right-click on “network.http.pipelining” on the config screen, and select “toggle” (in 1.0.7 it may be “edit”) On my computer/connection. pipelining was rarely noticeable, and I was concerned about its effect on loading sites like the SDMB. Try it both ways, and see which one is better for you.