USA Today has an article on sites programmatically disabling the back button and otherwise trying to hijack their users’ browsers so that they control how their users navigate their site. One possibility that they don’t mention is that some sites use complex, expensive, totally crappy application servers that can get confused when users click on the back button. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were the case with Home Depot’s site, which is mentioned in the article. (Quick note: I checked out Home Depot’s site and I couldn’t find any page where the back button is disabled, so I’m not sure why there were mentioned in the article.)