People are complaining a lot about it because they're just visiting it to explore before coming back to HN to comment. When people are actually using the page as a reference, it's much less likely that they'll want to go back to another website in the same tab.
Exactly this. Please don't change the behaviour, it's working exactly as it should. People seem to forget how this page would work had it been implemented with an ancient frameset (navigation in one frame, content in another).
Also, does nobody know that in pretty much any browser, you can hold down the back button to get a history list so you can jump back multiple pages in one step? Or the "History" menu.
