1795264 - Address-bar-enter in SPA causes full page reload in browser history

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Jochem]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:105.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/105.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to any SPA website, for example twitter
2. Click on a number of links
3. Do an "address-bar-enter" (click on the address bar and hit enter)
4. Again click on a number of links
5. Now navigate through your history using the back-forward buttons

Actual results:

When navigation through the history with the back-forward buttons, every time you visit the page you did the address-bar-enter, a full page reload is done. This means all variables in JavaScript are lost.

Note that this only happens with an address-bar-enter, not when you click on the page reload button.

Expected results:

No full page reload when navigation with the back-forward buttons.

Chrome(Chromium) and Safari do this.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Address Bar' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Hani Yacoub, Desktop QA]

Managed to reproduce the issue on macOS 11.6, Windows 10 x64 and on Ubuntu 20.04.

Comment 3

[James Teow [:jteow]]

We may want to operate more consistently as Chromium/Safari. Currently, I believe what we do is load the url via openTrustedLinkIn. So it seems like whatever changes we want to do may not be strictly address bar related but document navigation or session history related?

:smaug, do you have an opinion on this observation?

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We need to understand if this is the expected behaviour of document navigation or not. Once we have that, then we can decide if this needs to be fixed in document navigation or some other level.