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Microsoft Sites and Back Button History

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 13 views
  • Last reply by danielm1

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I was doing some research on Microsoft sites related to Microsoft Azure. I noticed that it became difficult to go back using the back button because each page was listed in the history twice. For instance, on this page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/

This made it exceedingly frustrating to navigate the site as I could never easily go back to the previous page. At first I thought it was something the Microsoft site was doing (and maybe it still is) but I do not see this same behavior on Chrome or Opera.

I have tried this on the latest versions of all of the above making sure to update each before listing my problem here. Is this a bug in Firefox still allowing some level of history hijacking or manipulation? Or is there some setting, extension, etc. that I need to look in to in order to fix this problem?

Thanks

I was doing some research on Microsoft sites related to Microsoft Azure. I noticed that it became difficult to go back using the back button because each page was listed in the history twice. For instance, on this page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/ This made it exceedingly frustrating to navigate the site as I could never easily go back to the previous page. At first I thought it was something the Microsoft site was doing (and maybe it still is) but I do not see this same behavior on Chrome or Opera. I have tried this on the latest versions of all of the above making sure to update each before listing my problem here. Is this a bug in Firefox still allowing some level of history hijacking or manipulation? Or is there some setting, extension, etc. that I need to look in to in order to fix this problem? Thanks

Chosen solution

Firefox does allow pages to add to tab history in some situations where other browsers do not. I doubt Microsoft is intentionally taking advantage of it. More likely, there is something weird in their site navigation that they didn't bother debugging. Either way, there is some more discussion of this issue in a recent Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nnq0u3/strange_history_when_page_has_iframes/

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Chosen Solution

Firefox does allow pages to add to tab history in some situations where other browsers do not. I doubt Microsoft is intentionally taking advantage of it. More likely, there is something weird in their site navigation that they didn't bother debugging. Either way, there is some more discussion of this issue in a recent Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nnq0u3/strange_history_when_page_has_iframes/

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The Reddit comments mention the "browser.navigation.requireUserInteraction" setting which was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

Modified by danielm1