First of all thanks @Arvis for an eye opening explanation.
I prefer different solution to the accepted answer here for this problem. I don't like messing with overriding back behavior any more than absolutely necessary and when I've tried adding and removing fragments on my own without default back stack poping when back button is pressed I found my self in fragment hell :) If you .add f2 over f1 when you remove it f1 won't call any of callback methods like onResume, onStart etc. and that can be very unfortunate.
Anyhow this is how I do it:
Currently on display is only fragment f1.
f1 -> f2
Fragment2 f2 = new Fragment2();
this.getActivity().getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction().replace(R.id.main_content,f2).addToBackStack(null).commit();
nothing out of the ordinary here. Than in fragment f2 this code takes you to fragment f3.
f2 -> f3
Fragment3 f3 = new Fragment3();
getActivity().getSupportFragmentManager().popBackStack();
getActivity().getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction().replace(R.id.main_content, f3).addToBackStack(null).commit();
I'm not sure by reading docs if this should work, this poping transaction method is said to be asynchronous, and maybe a better way would be to call popBackStackImmediate(). But as far I can tell on my devices it's working flawlessly.
The said alternative would be:
final FragmentActivity activity = getActivity();
activity.getSupportFragmentManager().popBackStackImmediate();
activity.getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction().replace(R.id.main_content, f3).addToBackStack(null).commit();
Here there will actually be brief going back to f1 beofre moving on to f3, so a slight glitch there.
This is actually all you have to do, no need to override back stack behavior...