496232 - Back button: browse history has redirect link that prevents the right behavior

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 606286

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Dan Swinehart]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10

Having browsed from newspaper home page to a story, attempting to return to the home page using the back button flashes for a while and then instead reloads the story. No doubt due to the original link having been hijacked by the paper's authentication code, which verifies that one has logged in. This leaves a link in the browser history stack of the form:

https://secure.www.mercurynews.com/portlet/registration/html/autoLogin.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercurynews.com%2Ftopstories%2Fci_12506691&remautokey=%2FDvS%2BzViEO01iOexYP9UE%2BbhPpEy7G3e777V9uBaiUA%3D&forced=true

When you try to go back, you encounter this link instead of the home page link, and this link, after presumably revalidating you, returns you to the story.

To actually succeed in backing up requires one to navigate the browser history manually. Tedious.

Does NOT happen in IE7. In IE, that link is somehow elided from the stack.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. You may need to get a free account at mercurynews.com or the like to replicate.
2. May not occur when accessing the first two or three stories. Newspapers don't demand login right away.
3. After that, just navigate away from www.mercurnews.com to one of its stories, and either examine the browser stack or push the back button.
Actual Results:  
As indicated, back button simply reloads current page in a complicated way.

Expected Results:  
Back button takes one back.

Comment 2

[Shad Sterling]

Why is the older bug the one marked as a duplicate of the newer?

Comment 3

[Dave Garrett]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Why is the older bug the one marked as a duplicate of the newer?

It's generally referred to as "forward duping" and is sometimes done when there's more info, more people CCed, or a cleaner bug where work is already beginning. It's at the discretion of those sorting bugs here and in this case the newer one is just where things are being worked on now.