I seem to recall that hijacking the back button goes back to the 1990's. I suspect some of the ways in which it was done (like with naive redirects) probably don't work today, but the annoying effect has been there for eons.
I don't think you are. I think early versions of the problem happened because the website did a redirect: x.y.com/ would sand you to w.y.com/ and your browser would stupidly remember that as a user navigation. Your back button from w.y.com would take you to x.y.com, which would perpetrate the redirect. The fix for that is not to enter redirects into the back history, only user-initiated navigations.
Congrats, very well done! What was the laser doing the cutting and engraving?
I loved the video format, reminded me of the Primitive Technology channel where he just gets out of the way and lets the work itself (plus closed captions) do all the talking.
That's why I just middle click to open everything on a new tab nowadays. Back button still works 90% of the times, but when it's hijacked it's incredibly annoying, and I have plenty of monitor width for the tabs.
Longpress on iOS Safari gives you a menu that lets you open a link in the background, which is essentially open in a new tab. I use it all the time, e.g to work through the HN front page selecting some comment pages to read later
I wish I could say thanks, but when I tried it out just now, I realised that I have seen it many times — trouble is, it's labelled in my mind as "that annoying popup I keep triggering by accident, how do I disable it?"
Still, have a metaphorical cookie: even though I don't like the thing, sharing knowledge kindly is always good :)
If nothing else, now you know what behavior was triggering the thing you don't like. Maybe now you can start to make it only happen deliberately, which might make it less annoying.
Another dark pattern is hijacking back to move you to the 'front page' of the site. Like twitter, get linked to a tweet and then the back button takes you to your feed, which absolutely nobody requested.
I'm surprised to see this from Instructables (Autodesk). If you right-click the back button you'll see that it did four redirects and you can click the 5th to get back.
Single page apps don't require a frontend router and the same can be achieved by unconditionally sending a redirect from the server side for any request as long as you also hook into the "beforeunload" event in the browser.