“intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

This reads like victim blaming or scapegoating. That ai company makes shoddy software that outputs faulty results, users output faulty results when using that software, and now the ai company blames the users for outputting faulty results. That some (but likely not all) users know that the results are faulty, doesn’t change that the software itself is faulty.

If it’s default behaviour for static pages, but not for dynamic pages, then it’s not much of a default. As a user I want ui actions to be consistent, the unknown stuff that happens in the background shouldn’t change the behaviour of the ui. Firefox now mostly gets around this issue by opening search engine links in new tabs (I can’t recall if that’s standard for Firefox or if I had to change settings, but I’ve been using it for years like that), but this wouldn’t have been needed if using the back button was reliable.

I found this 2022-2024 discussion with a few examples of the back button not working as expected: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/firefox-needs-to-do-something-about-back-button-history-loading/td-p/4678

I found no announcements of a fix. I also haven’t had much occasion of noticing a fix, since new pages open in a separate tab for me.

I wish that the back button would send me back to the page + page position that I was on when I (the user) clicked a link or entered a form. I’ve never had a desire to revisit automatic redirect pages, so imo default behaviour should be to send the user back to the point of the previous user action. To me this seems easy and logical to implement, but I’ve never seen it, so maybe I’m missing something and it’s not that easy.

My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.