This is not a website. It's a presentation made with reveal.js framework. This has been made as slides for a talk. It is very much feature that people accidentally don't back out of their presentation while they are doing it.

You can easily disable it with "history: false" in the reveal config. (As an author unfortunately)

There’s a browser API for preventing people from leaving pages if they are in a context like that. And unlike this method, it works for the first page, works if you try to close the tab, and works if you try to navigate to a different link. And it doesn’t become entangled with browser navigation.

Well my point is that it's a bit unfair to blame the authors of the presentation for this functionality. Reveal.js is pretty much the standard open-source javascript presentation framework. It's used and developed by slides.com. I don't know why it works like it does. But mind you this is 6 year old presentation with reveal.js from 2015.

Who blamed the authors and what did they blame them for?

yeah, this was particularly ironic.

The back button has evolved alongside SPAs, and users mostly don't expect or want their back button to take them back through the hundreds of small state changes they've caused by interacting naturally with a UI.

Because it's not website. It's a reveal.js presentation. It's on purpose so you don't get out of it when presenting.

Yep. Browsed the slides and then couldn't go back to HN using the back button. Is there a max history depth setting per ___domain in Chrome? I haven't run into this issue in awhile and forget why it happens.

Yeah found that out the hard way. Horrible design

This was pretty brutal.