How to stop erasing my forward browsing history
Half of the time, when I press the back button on a page, the forward button disappears as though I had never gone forward on that page. As someone who a) likes to read experimental web fiction and b) likes to use browsers to look at things on the web, this irritates the hell out of me. It would be really useful to be able to click back and forth between two pages in the same tab and compare them! Unfortunately Firefox seems to occasionally arbitrarily decide I don't want this, sometimes deleting many multiple pages forward that I! Was! Looking! At!
And I want to be clear this is not "I clicked back and then clicked on another page and now the page I was looking at is overwritten", this is "I clicked back and the forward arrow greyed out as though the next page I was looking at was no more than an appirition".
Surely I am not the only person who doesn't like when it does this. It provides no utility I can percieve and is massively inconveniencing.
How do I turn this off? I can't find any information on this, all I can find when I search is information about turning off the backspace button. This happens when I click the arrow in the tab bar.
Svi odgovori (3)
Some sites are coded in a way they update their location — effectively doing the same as if you navigated to some other link — which then invalidates your forward history stack.
In theory you might be able to stop the sites doing this with an extension like "noscript", but that might break more things than it fixes.
I'd generally recommend opening things into new tabs, so that if a site overwrites the history stack, you're not losing that link.
Is this a recent development in site technology, or something perhaps special to desktop PCs? I don't recall this being an issue before the last time I swapped computers (from laptop to desktop, 2024ish?).
You can't be advising me to open things in new tabs, I'm already at 364 and counting........
Eh, this has been around for years… but it's usually clumsy site operators adding tricks to circumvent anti–tracking measures and tamper with the way this normally works (if you search for "bounce tracking protection" it will explain some of it) — so it's plausible when you come back to a page, the site does 2-3 redirects between their own sites, to try connect your account potentially and the like — and these invisible navigations then wipe your forward history.
Do you have a site in mind where you've been experiencing this recently?