bug#69232: 30.0.50; [PATCH] EWW history navigation gets caught in a loop

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 2/24/2024 6:20 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Cc: 69232@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2024 19:45:49 +0530
>> From:  James Thomas via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>>   the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
>>
>> One possible problem with this patch, I realize now, is that if you
>> navigate backward ('l') and then visit another link there, the new page
>> is added to the very end of history rather than the immediate next
>> position. This would be confusing if you, then, navigate back and find
>> that it's not the page from which you followed the link. Perhaps the
>> original code was a hack around this?

I intentionally chose not to address this in my patch (though perhaps 
that's not the right call).

> The only reasonable alternative is to throw away all the history after
> 'l', which I don't think is better.
> 
> What do other browsers do in this situation?

They throw away any history after the page you clicked the link on 
(which I think is what you mean by the above).

Another option might be, "If you're at a historical page and you click a 
link, add that page as a duplicate to the end of the history." That 
would partially restore the old behavior, but only in this case where 
things might otherwise be confusing.

We could also add a user option to select between these behaviors, since 
the former is the de facto standard for browsers.

(I think the real fix would be something like a history *tree*, but 
that's probably quite a bit more work.)