Prevent Use of the Back Button (in IE)

So the SMEs at my current place of employment want to try and disable the back button for certain pages. We have a page where the user makes some selections and submits them to be processed. In some instances they have to enter a comment on another page.

What the users have figured out is that they don't have to enter a comment if they submit the information and go to the page with the comment and then hit the back button to return to the previous page.

I know there are several different solutions to this (and many of them are far more elegant then disabling the back button), but this is what I'm left with. Is it possible to prevent someone from going back to the previous page through altering the behavior of the back button. (like a submit -> return false sorta thing).

Due to double posting information I can't have it return to the previous page and then move to the current one. I can only have it not direct away from the current page. I Googled it, but I only saw posts saying that it will always return to the previous page. I was hoping that someone has some mad kung foo js skills that can make this possible.

I understand that everyone says this is a bad idea, and I agree, but sometimes you just have to do what you're told.

Don't do this, just don't. It's bad interface design and forces the user's browser to behave in a way that they don't expect.

I would regard any script that successfully stopped my back button from working to be a hack, and I would expect the IE team to release a security-fix for it.

The back button is part of their program interface, not your website.

In your specific case I think the best bet is to add an unload event to the page that warns the user if they haven't completed the form. The back button would be unaffected and the user would be warned of their action.

Nah, you're doomed. Even if you pop the page up in some different browser and hid the back button, there's always the Backspace key.

The problem with marketing guys and analyst types is that some of them do not understand the fundamental concept of the web being stateless. They do not understand that the page is totally, totally unaware of the browser using it and absolute control of the browser is totally outside the capability of web pages.

The best way to discourage your users to hit the back button is to make sure that your page loses all its data when they press back, e.g., the comment page is the only point where the data can be saved, and if they do press the back button they have to do everything all over again (think along the lines of pragma: nocache).

Users will complain, sure, but they are the reason that this godforsaken requirement exists, right?

I've seen this before:

window.onBack = history.forward();

It is most definitely a dirty hack and, if at all possible, I would attempt to not disable the back button. And the user can probably still get around it quite easily. And depending on caching, there is no telling if the server code will be processed or if the cached page with JavaScript will run first.

So, yeah, use at your own risk :)

I came up with a little hack that disables the back button using JavaScript. I checked it on chrome 10, firefox 3.6 and IE9:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<title>Untitled Page</title>
<script type = "text/javascript" >
function changeHashOnLoad() {
     window.location.href += "#";
     setTimeout("changeHashAgain()", "50"); 
}

function changeHashAgain() {
  window.location.href += "1";
}
// If you want to skip the auto-positioning at the top of browser window,you can add the below code:
window.location.hash=' ';
var storedHash = window.location.hash;
window.setInterval(function () {
    if (window.location.hash != storedHash) {
         window.location.hash = storedHash;
    }
}, 50);


</script>
</head>
<body onload="changeHashOnLoad(); ">
Try to hit the back button!
</body>
</html>

Prevent Use of the Back Button (in IE)

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