942595 - Don't do history swipe animation for history.pushState and anchor jump links

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect, P2)

Description

[Florian Bender]

Currently, the history swipe animation is shown for all navigations. However, the UX is severly confusing for these two cases:

1. history.pushState() / popState event: 
This is used by websites/webapps to keep the URL bar up-to-date when navigation is done through JavaScript/AJAX, i.e. only parts of the currently visible page are updated thereby breaking the metaphor of "previous document". 

2. (in-page) anchor jump links: 
This is used by websites to jump from one section of a page to another section of *the same page*. Thus, the metaphor of the "previous document" does not apply here, too. 

The swipe animation however is justified by the metaphor of the "previous document": When you swipe back, you swipe the current document to the side thereby revealing the previous document (page) laying underneath. In both cases above however, the document stays the same, thereby breaking the metaphor.

Safari (iirc) does the swipe animation in both cases, but I'd argue for a better UX rather than platform consistency here (IMHO, Safari does this wrongly!). As for GitHub, they used to have an animation for the part they replaced via AJAX (the file list), which looked ridiculous and very confusing with the Safari swipe animation, interfering with the in-page animation (this basically lead to two animations being played with a slight offset). So the browser is interfering with the page behaviour here which should be up to the website to implement.

Please, disable the swipe animation for the two cases above!

Comment 1

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

I don't see that we can ship the swipe feature without this fixed. So either we need to fix this or we need to disable it by default.

Comment 2

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

My bad, it's been disabled by default again already.

Comment 3

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

The code in question here has been removed in bug 860493.