Show HN: Space Invaders in the URL

https://arnaud.at/emoji

by arnaudsm • 7 years ago

38 18 7 years ago

arnaud.at

MulliMulli• 7 years ago

Cool stuff. A back button/link would be nice though.

robbrown451• 7 years ago

Ha. Pretty awesome. No luck using the back button to get back to Hacker News, but I guess that's unsurprising.

halotrope• 7 years ago

Very nice! However breaking the back button is very bad UX (remember ad-stuffed pages that would not let go back to google). I think it should be possible to change the hash without adding a new page by not using history API.

jwilk• 7 years ago

They are using location.hash.

history.replaceState() wouldn't break the back button, but apparently history API is throttled in some browsers; see the "One Last Thing" section on https://matthewrayfield.com/articles/animating-urls-with-jav... .

mfgs• 7 years ago

Cool! Firefox on mobile doesn't render the emojis though, just long strings of Unicode strings.

hutattedonmyarm• 7 years ago

For those on desktop Safari: You have to enable "Show full website address" in its "advanced" settings tab

kevinventullo• 7 years ago

I couldn’t figure out how to do this on Chrome for iOS. The relevant flag does not seem to exist.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

Quite confused on iphone safari and then to find the back history was hijacked as an integral component of this game

adtac• 7 years ago

WARNING: this completely obliterates your browser history. Open this only in a private browsing widow.

mrzool2• 7 years ago

Flagged. This doesn’t belong on the front page.

arnaudsm• 7 years ago

I am sorry about that, it was just a funny experiment.

I thought it was acceptable considering that you accepted a similar post 6 months ago, which stayed on the frontpage for a long time : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19679890

Volv• 7 years ago

Its interesting to me how many people complain about the history / request a back button / link.

I agree that sites shouldn't break history but tabs have made the back button almost obsolete to me.

Everything is middle clicked for new tab / middle clicked away when done.

I messed around with the site. Middle clicked it away and ended up here as I'd opened the comments in a new tab before I started. Didn't even notice the history issue.

Lynbarry• 7 years ago

Have you ever browsed on mobile?

_ph_3• 7 years ago

Indeed, in my normal browsing habits, I rarely rely on the back button, as it usually forces a page reload which is very slow. Like you, I am using a stack of tabs instead. On mobile though, I use the back button more, as tab creation is not as easy (why no browser does this with a 2-finger tab, I don't understand).

However, the side effect of this goes much further, it also hoses your browsing history, and sometimes you really need that. So while this is a cool hack, there shouldn't be a direct link on the HN front page.

tobyhinloopen• 7 years ago

I should have known better to click this link

_ph_3• 7 years ago

Please remove the direct link from the front page as it has negative effects on the browser due to screwing up the browser history. This link should be embedded in the post with a proper warning.

Show HN: Space Invaders in the URL

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