Back Button on Firefox Not Useful on Forum

[GPhillips]

Not a very descriptive title, but...

Using the latest version of Firefox on Windows 7, when I go into a thread and then try to use the back button on Firefox to go back to the sub-forum I was in, there can be 5 to 100 listings of the same page I'm on in that back button history list. So, it makes the back button useless and if I want to get back to the main sub-forum page, I need to click at the top of the page on a link.

It's been doing this for a few days at least. Not sure if it's the latest version of Firefox, or some ad on the pages that is the cause. It doesn't appear to do this in Chrome.

 

[Mark Blue]

I can't imagine this being anything other than a FF issue. Did that history list show up as a result of clicking the back button once or twice or several times? I stopped using FF a couple of years ago because of quirky issues like this and switched to Chrome for good. I'd recommend using the forum breadcrumb trail to return to any given forum or sub forum until the Mozilla developers correct what's happening with their latest release. I'd recommend reporting it to them via their forums or whatever other troubleshooting channels they offer. In the meantime you could try clearing your cache and deleting browsing history to see if that gets you anywhere. Thanks for voicing your concern.

 

[MClarkson]

My firefox also has this problem now.

 

[GPhillips]

All I had to do was hit the back arrow once for this to show up, but perhaps clicking it more than once results in more entries in the list. The only reason I had any suspicion of this website/ads is that no other website/forum that I visit has the same behavior. Strange.

 

[Jeff Duda]

I also use Firefox mainly, but I don't have this problem because I don't use the back button to navigate the site. You can travel back to your subforum by clicking on it in the page heading. See below

 

[GPhillips]

Yeah, that's what I've been doing since this thing started, but I'm so used to otherwise hitting the back button on any forums I visit to get back to where I was previously, it just takes some getting used to.

 

[Mark Blue]

Just so you guys know, what Jeff pointed out in his diagram is the same point I made - use the breadcrumb trail to navigate backwards, it doesn't get any better than that. It's the ideal way to navigate on today's websites that have it enabled and is a foolproof way of navigating back whether it be one or multiple steps.

I spent a few hours looking at this yesterday and it appears to be a problem that FF has had over the years. Most of the experts advise restarting FF in safe mode to see if disabling the installed extensions eliminates the problem. Then from there you can start re-enabling each extension one at a time to find the culprit. More often than not it's an advertising blocking extension that causes this issue, but others can be involved too.

I searched and combed through the Xenforo forum for reports of FF back button issues and there weren't any to be found. Xenforo is the software we use on ST and I was searching in their support forum. I will keep an eye out for future reports there though just in case. I also found evidence of this FF behavior happening on multiple and various other websites across the spectrum of the internet. If you guys are interested in fixing the issue on your own I'd recommend spending your time on Google (for starters), the stack exchange, the official Mozilla FF forums, Reddit.com/r/Firefox, and anywhere else you can find useful information. It's a treasure trove to say the least!

Edit: you can also look for which extension was most recently updated as the culprit, especially if this behavior started recently.