14 thoughts on “My Pet Peeve Du Jour”

1. FWIW I didn’t experience any such problem with IE or Chrome.

2. It let me back out using IE. However, I’ve had that problem with many websites and it is very annoying. The worst problem I’ve had lately is with Popular Mechanics. The page loads partially and then freezes due to some background script. I’ve tested it by letting it go for up to 20 minutes. All it does is hog up to 50% of my CPU and never finishes. Streaming video is blocked at work and I suspect that’s part of the problem. I emailed them about it last week but the problem persisted for several days afterwards. I don’t think I’ll go there any more.

3. Right clicking your back arrow and picking one of your previous pages from the list should work. I’ve encountered more and more of these insidious things. It’s all a ploy to get advertising dollars, though how forcing someone to close their browser to get away from you is a good way to get new customers. It’s like imprisoning someone in your store until they buy something.

   1. Using a non-IE browser and enabling ad-blocking or script-blocking extensions helps with this kind of problem, although I expect most people reading here probably know that.

4. I usually just right click on a link and open it in a new tab. Ctrl-W is my back arrow…

5. I left-clicked my back button and came right back in Firefox 8 beta.

   Still, I’ve developed the habit of right-clicking the back button as Andrea says — though I also open a lot of links in new tabs if I expect to follow links found on the linked site. Touring my blogroll, for example, I open everything in new tabs.

6. I also had no problem backing out from the link but I do share a similar pet peeve. On some job search sites you can’t open links to jobs in new tabs and instead have to click the link and then use the back button to return to the search, which may or may not require you to click next seven times to get back to the page you were viewing.

7. WHat I’ve come to despise are the popup ads and bars — such as the bar at the bottom of the screen here: http://online.wsj.com/article/best_of_the_web_today.html — that obscure the content of the site and that can’t be moved and and don’t have a kill button.

   1. That is insidious. At first it doesn’t appear. Then it popups in a strange area. There is a close button, but that only minimizes it. And if I accidentally clicked it, I’d just close the tab and not go back.

      1. Huh. I don’t see a close button, but it’s always at the bottom of my screen in Firefox on my Mac and Linux machines. I’ve encountered other pop-up bars that do have “minimize to tab at edge of window” buttons, but I don’t see one here.

      2. There’s an extension–probably more than one–to deal with that. My primary browser is Chrome, so I use ad-block plus, and there’s a way to block individual page elements. The problem is that some of those bars are a pain in the next to track down the outermost element. It can be done–I spent a while one and managed to kill the meebo sharing bar.

         1. For example, the one you were talking about–I believe–can be gotten rid of by blocking http://si.wsj.net/img/subscriberBar_NoExpand.png, although you might just wind up in an arms race.

8. I’ve gotten into a habit of right clicking links and creating a new tab. That way I can always close the link and return to my previous point. I even do it when commenting here. I open a tab to comment, comment, close tab, and then go to next post.

   Otherwise, completely agree. Javascript redirects tend to be worse offenders.

   1. This is what I do too.

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