1703080 - Firefox adds extra back/forward menu history entry on hashchange, which can lead to poor UX when the back button is pressed.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1645211

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Thomas Wisniewski [:twisniewski] [on PTO until the 16th]]

If a page does something like the following:

document.addEventListener(
  "DOMContentLoaded",
  () => {
    if (!location.hash) location.hash = "/login";
  }
);

Firefox will add a history entry for the initial page-load, then a second one for the hash-changed location (both are visible in the back-button in the address bar). Chrome seems to only replace the initial page-load.

Depending on how the page behaves on the initial page-load, this can cause the user to be unable to go back to the previous page in history unless they long-click the back button and manually select to skip the previous site. For instance, this is presently occuring on the Citywide Banks site as seen in https://webcompat.com/issues/68511 (ie, visit example.org, then the bug URL).

Comment 1

[Thomas Wisniewski [:twisniewski] [on PTO until the 16th]]

This seems possibly related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1515073

Comment 2

[Thomas Wisniewski [:twisniewski] [on PTO until the 16th]]

It also seems that these "extra" history entries are being added when history.pushState is called, where only the hash changes (as noticed on https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/google-headquarters.html in https://webcompat.com/issues/67631)

Comment 3

[Thomas Wisniewski [:twisniewski] [on PTO until the 16th]]

Johann, you worked on bug 1515073, maybe you have an idea of what's going on here?

Comment 4

[Neha Kochar [:neha]]

This will be changed/fixed as part of user interaction work in bug 1645211 .