Why does opening something in a new tab obliterate your history? | Hacker News Reader

Why does opening something in a new tab obliterate your history?

1 pointshurcooL2 comments

Is there a good reason for this that I'm missing?

In modern browsers, if I click on a link in an article that I'm reading and I'm taken there, I can press back to go back to where I came from. If I decide to open it in a new background tab (so I can finish the article and then read the newly opened tab), that new tab will have its history erased. Why? I would like it to stay so I could press back and figure out where I came from.

It happens quite often that I end up trying to find where I came from on a tab that happened to be opened as new, and hence has no back history. (One hack that I've learned to avoid this problem in desktop Chrome is to duplicate the tab, then click a link regularly. This preserves the back history.)

The answer is simple -- each tab has its own separate history, and a newly created tab has no history.

In tab 1, you might have a long history of earlier sites. If you create a new tab 2 by any of several means from tab 1, the new tab has no history until you create one, a separate one for that tab.

This is generally regarded as a "good thing" -- it means you can have separate histories for different purposes in different tabs.

I am sure that, if a new tab inherited the history of its parent tab, someone would complain that that made no sense. And they would be right.

> (One hack that I've learned to avoid this problem in desktop Chrome is to duplicate the tab, then click a link regularly. This preserves the back history.)

All that does is create a history starting with the original URL that opened the tab. Just as you would expect.

It's as though each tab is a separate browser incarnation -- and that's by intent.

It's more than just the history of the tab, is an overall overhaul of how we consume links that is required. Browsers need a new way of opening new links and tabs so that we keep intact the context of the main article that we came from.

Perhaps split screen or side panel navigation, where the new link opens in such away that we can still see where we came from, and go back to it easily. This will hopefully end the list of open tabs, where we can't remember why we opened it in the first place

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