291777 - Improving the back button experience

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 38486

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[jim_nance]

The back button in firefox is slow.  There are other bugs filed on that.  This
bug makes a specific proposal for making it faster.

Our current back button seems to operate by reloading and reflowing the page. 
We have tabbed browing, which means we have the ability to have multiple web
pages open at the same time.  It should be possible to leverage this code so
that the front and back buttons navigate through a cache of tabs.  These tabs
would not show up in the tab bar at the top of the screen, they would only be
navicable via the front and back buttons.

Operation is simple.  When a link is clicked on, the rendering for the current
page is not altered.  Instead, a new tab is opened on top of the existing page
and that tab is used to display the new link.  If the back button is pushed, the
ealier tab becomes active again.  If foward is pushed, we switch again.  There
would need to be some limit to the number of tabs created for navigation via the
forward/back buttons in order to conserve memory.  When navigating to pages very
far back or ahead in the history list, we would fall back to the current mechanism.

Finally, I suspect that I am using the wrong terminology, and that tab is not
the correct term to use.  I hope its obvious what I am proposing anyway.

Thanks - Jim

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

dupe of bug 38486 (but real work will be done in bug 274784)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 38486 ***