Reader: Back Navigation Not Working Properly

[artemiomorales]

Context and steps to reproduce

Back navigation is inconsistent throughout the Reader.

• Start at /read and click on a recent post or author avatar
• Click the back button — see that you go back to the previous page as expected
• Now click on the Likes page
• Click on a user avatar
• Click the back button — see that you go to the wrong page (the page that you went to the first time you clicked the back button)

Expected: Browser goes to the Likes page.
Actual: Browser goes to another page in your history.

This seems to happen whenever you click the back button or navigate back once. After that, the backwards navigation breaks.

back-button-bug-v3.mp4

Site owner impact

Less than 20% of the total website/platform users

Severity

Moderate

What other impact(s) does this issue have?

No revenue impact

If a workaround is available, please outline it here.

No response

Platform

No response

[holdercp]

@artemiomorales I've tried a bunch of different ways to reproduce this on trunk and production and I've been unsuccessful. Here's what I'm seeing:

Screen.Recording.2025-01-15.at.2.41.11.PM.mov

I noticed in your video that you're running Calypso locally. Is there a chance this is a bug with a development branch you were working on?

[holdercp]

@artemiomorales Just following up on this. I was unable to reproduce on production. Are you still seeing this issue?

[artemiomorales]

@holdercp Thanks for looking at this! Yes, I'm seeing the issue on production. Here's a screen capture:

back-button-bug-v4.mp4

It happens very consistently in Chrome for me, about 90% of the time. I've just tried in Firefox and it happens far less consistently, maybe 10% of the time.

Perhaps there's an issue with some of the users in my feed, or an issue with my account? I notice it when I'm just casually using the Reader; it's pretty frustrating. I wonder if anyone else can reproduce it? 🤔

[holdercp]

I'm able to reproduce in Chrome and it looks like the issue started back around December 30th according to logs. I've identified what's happening but not why it's happening yet.

[holdercp]

@artemiomorales

^ Nevermind. I discovered another issue with navigation that was introduced recently but it has slightly different behavior.

I'm still unable to reproduce even when using the latest Chrome and following the steps in the video
/read -> feed -> back button -> /activities/likes -> feed -> back button

I consistently land back on /activities/likes.

Do you see any console errors? My suspicion is the router state is not being updated correctly when going to /activities/likes so it "skips" that page when going back but I can't seem to trigger the bug on my end.

[artemiomorales]

@holdercp I signed out, cleared my local storage and cookies, and still saw the issue. I just updated the latest version of Chrome, and still see the issue. It's actually worse now, potentially due to the recently merged profile page — the back navigation is now pretty broken in a few cases.

I sometimes see a Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'replace') error, sometimes coupled with a rest-proxy/?v=2.0:21 POST https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/js-error?_envelope=1 429 (Too Many Requests) error, though it's not necessary to see the issue.

I also occasionally see a async-load-emoji-text.32cc1dfd0c564f465b3e.min.js:1 Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading '0') error, though it's not necessary to see the issue either.

Here's a video going through some flows, showing the back button working incorrectly with and without the above errors:

back-button-bug-v5.mp4

[artemiomorales]

I also noticed another, potentially related issue and opened it today: #99166

[holdercp]

The video was very helpful. It's very obvious this is an issue, I just cannot seem to reproduce it. The first issue with the "cannot read properties of undefined..." was fixed in #99123.

Still working at it but even after following your steps, I can't reproduce the issue. This makes me think it's due to some difference between our env's.

Do you see any errors or warnings when running locally? Maybe the error/warning is getting muted in production. There does seem to be some perceived slowness on the Likes page so maybe there's something with that specific page. Does it always occur when attempting to navigate back to activities/likes?

[Addison-Stavlo]

I am not able to reproduce this either, what I am seeing is consistent with what @holdercp describes. 🤔

[holdercp]

Sorry, I lost track of this with the board filtering. I'm going to move this to Unassigned since it's difficult to reproduce. Not trying to push work on you @artemiomorales but maybe you're the best person to investigate the root cause since you can reproduce reliably.