[kazinator]

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.

[reaperman]

I remember browsers stopped it for awhile. Maybe I’m misremembering?

[kazinator]

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.

[sublinear]

This is still around

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API