Comment sort refreshes the entire page (new new reddit)

[GammaBoost]

If you have a default comment sort selected (in my case, top) and click on a post, it will refresh the entire page rather than seamlessly opening like normal.

Clicking the post back button sends you to the subreddit page rather than where you were before.

If you manually change the comment sort then it doesn't refresh the whole page.

[bmndc]

I don't think it's feasible to fully replicate Reddit's default behaviour when it comes to post/comment sorting, but @joelacus may have a say on this. Reddit does the sorting internally using AJAX. If RE was to do such thing, we might need API access to your account, because i.e. your frontpage posts are not public data. Without using the Reddit APIs, we have two options:

1. attach the sorting method to the current page URL then reload, and Reddit will happily display your posts in that method; this is what we're doing right now, and we can try to get the URL loaded as quickly as the browser allows us;
2. mimic your click on the sorting method dropdown menu. RE would have to wait until the menu is rendered, then access the shadow DOM, which takes a split second longer and you might still see the pre-sorted feed.

I believe Reddit also attaches the sorting method to the URL in Old UI as well.

Regarding the back button on posts, that is its default behaviour and RE doesn't try to modify it. If you either come to Reddit from a non-Reddit page, or have Open posts in new tab on in your Reddit preferences, the button redirects you to the subreddit page, rather than taking you back to your search engine or wherever you came from. If you land on a post from another Reddit page, the button does as intended and redirects you back to that Reddit page.

[GammaBoost]

I found a better solution, as long as you're logged in. Go to https://old.reddit.com/prefs/ and under "comment options", change "sort comments by" to what you want. In my case I also wanted to enable "ignore suggested sorts", which is only an option on old reddit. Both options apply to all reddit interfaces though, including new reddit and the mobile app.

[bmndc]

New New UI doesn't seem to respect Old UI's "sort comment by" setting in my testing, only Old New UI and Old UI itself. But that's a plus in my book though. I personally don't use the official mobile app, so I don't know about that.