Searchers say bug bars way back to Google Google users are complaining of a search bug that prevents them from returning to the company's web-dominating search engine via their browser "back" buttons. The company has acknowledged the bug, saying it affects users running Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, and it plans to roll out a fix today. According to multiple …
Don't need this feature any more, because Google is now remembering you, and where you live. They use it, of course, to send you customised advertising, but they justify it by sorting your search results to give you the ones you prefer from the area where you connect.
Yeah - my work machine got picked for that experiment. Why is it that there's a persistent undercurrent of developers that think they can waste screen space? Let the users decide what appears.
Oh and while I'm having an early morning rant with my cuppa - what goes through the tiny minds of Adobe developers? What total muppet thought that upgrading Acrobat Reader was a good excuse to put the application icon on my desktop? Seriously - has anyone, ever, in the whole history of human computing wanted to launch Acrobat Reader from a desktop icon? Come to that - from any icon?
Of course they haven't, but that's not why this exists.
1) The package they use to build the installer had an option to create a start menu shortcut.
2) The marketing department of the company that makes the installer package decides that they need more features.
3) The installer package developers respond by offering to put additional shortcuts in various other places. Problem: no other such place makes any sense from a UI perspective. Solution: add "the desktop" since even though it is pointless it is at least visible.
4) So when the "installer builder" product is sold onto to developers like those at Adobe, there is an option (on by default, because otherwise you wouldn't know it was there and the marketing department would wet their pants) to do something really daft.
5) Add one lazy developer and presto - every end-user finds a pointless icon on their desktop!
Almost everything on Windows replaces the desktop icon when installing a new version. I got blase once and thought I'd dragged some icons onto the recycle bin while holding the shift key. but windows somehow bogged itself down doing something else (probably McAfee related) and it actually thought I was making a selection box when I thought I was dragging things into the bin. lost a couple of documents, but they weren't hugely important.
Grenade to destroy all those desktop shortcuts I don't want
I'd say it's not a bug at all - if you go to page 1, get redirected to page 2, then click back, you'll go back to page 1 - which will redirect you back to page 2. Expected behavior...unless Google is adding their own redirect in their 'experiment,' which they should probably not be doing.
The redirecting request in google should have issued an HTTP redirect in the header, and the browser should have interpreted that as meaning that the actual page should replace the redirecting resource in the browser history. That's how all good form posts work, so you don't end up reposting form content left right and centre
Yahoo do a redirect too. The links on the results page look kosher in your browser status bar if you hover over them but if you copy and paste the link it has tons of random chars added which I can only assume are some kind of unique ID. Whether it breaks IE8's back button is something others may care to check.
You have to carefully time the double back-buttoning. Too fast and the second click registers as taking place from the last page. Too late and the redirect has already started.
It's easier to click on the drop-down button next to the back button to display your page history, and then select the results page from the history list. Then you don't have to worry about the timing.
..that your first instruction gets ignored and you have to do something else.
I hope you're not a software developer.
When people issue an instruction to a computer they expect it to have the desired effect. They don't expect to have to find an alternative. Or hey, here's an idea. I'll reprogram your mouse so that the first time you move it after a 30 second break it moves in a random direction. Or the first time you use second gear on your car the breaks will come on.
People expect back to mean back. They don't want it to mean back-oh-damn-now-I-have-to-drop-down-a-combo-box-I've-almost-forgotten-about.
I can recall encountering this problem for years on all browsers - maybe it has only started happening on Google recently (but I am sure it has been happening on sponsored links for ages) - but there are plenty of other sites where it happens (some more difficult to work around)
Yes it is a pita, yes it is wrong - but the reality is some times you have to learn to work around the people who don't want you to do things your way.
..but a Google one.
If you click a link, get redirected then redirected again, going "back" should take you back one page.
It's Google redirect that's screwed.
Some people may just say that Google are blaming i.e. as they have a rival browser that I'm sure doesn't have the "bug".
But not me of course.
Welcome to the world of live alpha testing.
I've gotten into the habit of, from any search/news/index page, spawning each interesting link into a new tab. Essentially, the advent of tabbed clients has turned web browsing into a breadth-first exercise, rather than depth-first, and so there is much less need for backtracking. (Yes, this was always possible, but managing a dozen or so windows becomes rather unwieldy.)
I was in the experiment for a while, but since I never go back to search results, I don't know how my browser would have handled it, and didn't think to examine the mechanism at the time. A browser' behavior can depend on how the redirect is generated. An HTTP 3xx response should be transparent to the user; going back one step will return to the search results. It's more ambiguous if a meta-refresh tag or javascript is used, as in some cases a user may want to go back to the page that generated the redirect.
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