Firstly, thanks for the discussion yesterday:
How to handle outbound links in desktop PWA?
Ben Halper...
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you can attach custom object when calling history.pushState()
We solved it with storing 'depth' parameter. Each time user goes down we increase it by +1.
Then you can decide if the back button should be on/off with history.state.depth > 0
I'm not sure this feature would be really helpful since I'm using the PWA in my phone (Android) and I never feel the need to use the back button (and of course, same goes to the desktop website).
If I wanna go back I just press the DEV logo, and that's pretty convenient!
The great part about DEV is that it has a non-dense site map... just the home page which leads to different places (articles, settings, notifications, DMs).
Back button does work in Android PWA. Just a habit on Android to use back button lol, is a lot closer to my thumb than the dev button.
Maybe you are looking for
window.history.length? UPD: just double checked, it doesn't subtract the number when you use back button :/Maybe there's a way to do some programming magic and get that to work?
Between that and other persistence like
localStorageetc, there is probably a technically possible way to make it happen. We only have to worry about on-site situations because this is for the standalone app.This is a pretty generalizeable situation so if anyone wanted to build a library for this I'm all for it! 😄
There's a proposal to add field to the Web Manifest to hint that navigation should be shown that would work across devices. Here's a better thread. In the meantime, there is a CSS media query that you could use to determine when to show your navigation.
I might be mistaken, but it seems like
minimal-uimode doesn't work on the desktop. It looks likestandaloneno matter which I use.Right now for this issue of deciding whether a user can go back, I essentially hide the back button when the current route is "/" (root)
As I'm assuming the user enters via the root route and then navs forwards, this seems to work.
I had also to add this type of navigation for a site that was used inside an iframe inside of a browser extension.
Check this example. I had to track navigation myself.
codesandbox.io/s/busy-pascal-04db6
codesandbox.io/s/small-leaf-8f9kk
I have come a across this issue before in another project.
On document.referrer it holds the previous page, if it contains a URL with dev.to you can then use window.history.back() (other wise prevent it going back as to not leave the page/app unless required)
Thing I can't remember is, ain't there a history list API that returns back all the previous pages you were at?
ihc.io/connect/tinker/smartrec/
I tried it like so. Seems to work.
Don't.
Don't use standalone or fullscreen if you want navigation buttons.