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history.pushState should clear forward history The spec currently says: "If the method invoked was the pushState() method: Remove from the session history any entries for the Document from the entry after the current entry up to the last entry in the session history that references the same Document object, if any. If the current entry is the last entry in the session history, or if there are no entries after the current entry that reference the same Document object, then no entries are removed." I believe this behavior is undesirable. Instead, pushState should clear the entire forward history regardless of which documents are involved. A major use case for history.pushState is to eliminate the dummy reference fragment navigations used by many apps to add entries to session history without causing a "real" page load. In that case, the app author wants to simulate a real page load, and an important UI component of a real page load is that the forward navigation button becomes disabled. It seems strange when a "navigation" doesn't result in a disabled forward button in the browser UI, so an app developer may be unsatisfied using pushState in place of reference fragment navigations. Moreover, Firefox has implemented pushState in a manner that clears the forward history. The Mozilla folks seem to favor their implementation. There is also support in the WebKit community for changing WebKit to match Firefox instead of what is currently spec'd.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Accepted Change Description: see diff given below Rationale: Concurred with reporter's comments.
Checked in as WHATWG revision r4593. Check-in comment: Rationalise the various places that require the session history to be cleared. Make sure document.open() with replace=true also clears the session history. http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=4592&to=4593