https://example.com/#!/
https://example.com/#!/about/
https://example.com/#!/users/
Are all the same page as far as the browser concerns, and if you move from `/#!/` to `/#!/users/`, and reload the page, you still load the same page (i.e. `/`).But that was too ugly for URLs, so modern websites now use browser history APIs just so they can remove 3 characters from the URL and do stuff like:
https://example.com/
https://example.com/about/
https://example.com/users/
Sure, if you load `/` and move to `/about/` you don't load a new page because of browser history APIs; but if you then refresh, now you load a different, uncached page (`/about/`, instead of `/`) even if the HTML in the response is exactly the same as in `/`.Sure, the difference is not much, but to me it still seems like a waste when the response could have been cached already like in the first example.
Would back/forward buttons continue to work if we decided not use browser history APIs?
I could try with something like React, but that's too much for a quick test.
.replaceState() will replace current url without putting it in the history, so back won't work, while .pushState() does.
So they invented the history API's so SPA's could stop breaking some of the user expectations they were breaking.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/10/proposal-f...