OT: stuffing browser history

[Larry Blanchard]

Yes, it's off topic. But I've recently run into something that's new, at least to me.

Two different websites I've gone to lately have stuffed extra lines into my browser history. Looks like one about every 5-10 seconds.

The result of course, is that the only way to leave the site is to call up history and go down below their list or to delete all recent history.

I did a search for this technique using several different phrases and couldn't find anything about it. Is this something new? Have any of you seen the problem?

[hubops]

Are the websites, perhaps, just trying to run a video, or some other very large script ? .. and your connection speed and/or browser cache insufficient .. ? My most hated files are Adobe pdf .. they are invariably much-oversized and will hang everything else. I will generally hit Ctrl-Alt-Del go to "Processes" tab and "end" the troublesome application .. John T.

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[Richard]

Almost all the news sites do that when you click to see a video.

But, like you said, drob down below to the root page and you can get back in one step.

[John McCoy]

Larry Blanchard wrote in news:mar8pe$vdq$ [e-mail]:

It's common. A lot of sites use a javascript routine to load their content as if it were a new page - so if you hit "back" you go back to the javascript and it just reloads the page. Some sites use a similar routine to refresh the page content every so often (so you get what you're seeing, a whole bunch of pages in history).

Both are bad programming - you can load content into a page with javascript without creating a whole new page - but there are a lot of hack programmers creating pages now-a-days, and stuff like that gets copied a lot. I don't think it's intentionally evil in most cases, it's just bad.

John

[Richard]

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Hanlon's razor

[Swingman]

Exactly. Seeing this more and more these days, and it is indeed bad programming. The practice started to become noticeable in the last couple of years.

If you keep hitting the back button repeatedly you can sometimes over come it.

You nailed it.

Boils down to the cut n' paste mentality of the collectively most poorly educated generation, with regard to science and technology, in the last

75 years.

[Greg Guarino]

At least with the browser I use (Firefox), you can right-click the Back button and choose which page to go to from a list of the past several you visited.

[Dave Balderstone]

Safari as well, and Chrome.

djb

[Artemus]

With Firefox you can clear various histories by doing ctrl-alt-del while you are in the FF window. A pop up window then gives you control of what to clear and over what time frame. Try it, it's pretty much self explanatory. Art

[Larry Blanchard]

Not under Ubuntu Linux - probably a quirk of Windows.

But I had no problem clearing the history, I just wondered about the $%^ $# stuffing :-).