[dspillett]

> You get a link from LinkedIn [or such]. You click on it, the URL loads, and you read the post. When you click the back button, you aren't taken back to wherever you came from. Instead, […]

I've taken to opening anything in a new tab. Closing the tab is my new back button. In an idea world I shouldn't have to, of course, but we live in a world full of disks implementing dark patterns so not an ideal one. Opening in a new tab also helps me apply a “do I really care enough to give this reading time?” filter as my browsers are set to not give new tabs focus - if I've not actually looked at that tab after a little time it gets closed without me giving it any attention at all.

Specifically regarding LinkedIn and their family of dark patterns, I possibly should log in and update my status after the recent buy-out. I've not been there since updating my profile after the last change of corporate overlords ~9 years ago. Or I might just log in and close my profile entirely…

[bluGill]

When I intentionally want to read something that is what I do. However once in a while I'm scrolling, selecting a window, or some other activity; and I happen to click on a link: instead of whatever action I intended I end up on a new page I didn't want to read (maybe I will want to read it, but I haven't go far enough cognitively to realize that). That is when I want my back button to work - a get out of here back to where I was.

[docmars]

Exactly, it has the potential to make you lose something important, forcing you to dig through browser history to find it again. If it happens to be a long-lived tab, you might be searching for a while if you forgot the name or site you were on.

[sidewndr46]

given the level of hostility most businesses have towards their customers, we should probably be opening links in disposable virtual machines

[dspillett]

Or just log all cookies and other localstorage against the domain of the top-level window.location which would achieve most of what a VM would with much lower overhead.

The only problem is that this would break some things like certain SSO systems, so you would have to implement a white-list to allow shared state, and the UX for that would be abused to nag users to whitelist everything. Most people would just click “OK” by default like they do with everything else, and those of us with more sense would have a new reason to be irritated by incessant nagging.

[troupo]

> Closing the tab is my new back button.

In Safari if you open a new tab, don't navigate anywhere, and click back, the tab closes and takes you back to the originating page. I've gottent so used to it, I now miss it in any other browser

[znort_]

>I've taken to opening anything in a new tab.

this is the way.

[cortesoft]

I have always done this, although mostly so I don’t have to reload the page I am coming from when I hit the back button.

[Baljhin]

Many years ago I was 'converted' to browse like that, one of the reasons was just that - to prevent back-button fatfinger.

Here's the setup I use:

[1] install this userscript, keep the default `include` i.e. 'every link": https://greasyfork.org/scripts/12367-open-links-in-new-tab; add to the `exclude` section the sites from [2].

[2] install this one and turn OFF the default: https://greasyfork.org/scripts/4416-open-links-in-current-ta...; add any sites you want to stay in the same tab to the `include` section (e.g. see [0]). Depending on how you browse, this will be a small list.

You can couple this with a tab-memory addon: example-- set [1]-Tabs to 'sleep' after a certain time; that way they're not using resources but still available later.

AND if you decide you're not gonna read those tabs anyway, just manually close them with having to activate them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763404

[dspillett]

This too. Particularly required for broken SPA-style sites that reset when you re-enter instead of properly maintaining their state, or infinite scroll based pages that don't remember where you scrolled to/through.

[RajT88]

This is the way. People think I am eccentric for the number of tabs I keep open.

[dspillett]

I am eccentric, née properly insane, which is part of why I have so many tabs left open over my various devices. Sometimes a browser crash that loses some or all that context is a benefit!

[bertil]

I do that everywhere, but it seems to fail for LinkedIn: they don’t redirect the link if it’s not in the same tab.

[dspillett]

Bad design on their part, another reason not to revisit! If a site breaks my workflow I generally stop using the site, rather than changing my workflow.

Though I'm guessing it would work in the cases being discussed in this article & thread: when you are navigating into a site (such as linkedin) from another, rather than following internal links.