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by NoGravitas 1715 days ago
Back basically works like it always did on static sites. Blame the fashion for single-page apps and endless scrolling for it being broken.
1 comments

No. Blame browsers for not being user-agents any more. Browsers can cache websites, but only if websites tell them to do so. Users are never asked ( there is no setting ). And since websites usually don't want to be cached (for too long) browsers have to reload them ( which takes time ). Thats the reason Back-buttons are slow. Thats ( one of ) the reason(s) everybody has 100+ tabs open.

SPAs and infinite scroll are (maybe) bad, but not the cause of this problem.

Some infinite scroll-type pages consume ridiculous amounts of memory the further you scroll (and if the page disallows direct navigation to a point in history and you need to find something older that you didn't save a direct link for, you've got no choice but to scroll, and scroll, and scroll…), so limitless caching isn't quite the right answer, either…