One or two people have been in touch to say that when they arrive at IT Reviews, their browser's 'back' button no longer works, so they can't go back to a previous page. They assume that this is something we do to prevent people wandering off elsewhere.

It's not. We don't have any code on our site for breaking your browser's back button. Doing so would be against our principles of fairness, and would be counter-productive too.

But we do have JavaScript code that makes our site 'break out' of any frames. This is to prevent unauthorised companies putting our content in a frame, wrapping it in advertising and pretending it's their own, which has happened several times in the past.

What this means is that any site that 'frames' our site will effectively destroy the back button. Framing other sites' content is (in our opinion and that of most Internet authorities) an unethical practice, which is why this code is in place. Sorry if it's caused you any problems.

Update, January 2008: unfortunately we've found that Google's image search pages are now doing this (framing our content), so if you come to our site via a Google image search you won't be able to go directly back. Again, we apologise for this, but having seen several organisations stealing our content by framing it, this seems to be our only option (unless any Web developers out there know of a better solution? We've tried "top.location.replace(self.location)" but that breaks other things).

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