Preserve tab history when a link is opened in new tab

debiedowner

Or in other words, copy the tab history (the "back" entries) to the newly opened tab. Basically what the pre-Quantum Firefox add-on BackTrack Tab History did.

Currently, if a link is opened in new tab, it has no history. I often find myself wanting to go back to the previous page in such tabs, but that tab is closed or lost among a bunch of other tabs. So I find myself looking for it in tab bar, closed tabs list, history, assuming I even have some idea what the title or URL of that page was, which is sometimes not the case.

BackTrack Tab History add-on had some additional features that can be seen in the linked page, but just copying the tab history to the new tab would be good enough in my opinion and would probably not be too difficult to implement. The only current workaround I know is cloning the current tab and then opening the link in current tab, which preserves the history, but too slow and inconvenient to do every time, especially since I won't need that history most of the time, but having it as a feature would be very useful for when I do.

Pesala

@debiedowner Use Clone Tab, then open the link with left-click.

debiedowner

@Pesala I already mentioned why I don't do that... But if you want me to expand further, do you really suggest that on every link I open in new tab (i.e. most of the links I open), I clone a tab, wait for it partially redownload and render again, (which wastes CPU cycles/battery and even bandwidth on heavy pages and might not even be possible in SPA-type pages or dynamic websites, and wastes time either case), on the 1% chance that I will need to go back in that tab's history? That would take so much more time and effort than it would save.

Pesala

@debiedowner What would copying the tab history not do that clone tab does?

The data should already be cached, so what needs to be redownloaded?

Most of the time you don't need the history, but when you do, using clone tab does what you want.

rkzn

@Pesala said in Preserve tab history when a link is opened in new tab:

What would copying the tab history not do that clone tab does?

Explicitly needing to clone the tab?

I guess @debiedowner means that they wanted a one-click solution to keeping tab history. Not a multi-click clone tab / wait for rendering / find the link / click link solution.

debiedowner

@Pesala Like I repeatedly said, the workaround "Clone Tab + click link" does exactly what I want as it preserves history, but do you really not see that "Clone Tab + click link" is so much more difficult than just "middle click" or "ctrl + click", especially as I would need to do it hundreds of times a day?

Most websites aren't simple like https://example.com where cloning it requires no download and renders instantly... E.g. try cloning this very page while a network monitor is on and look at the throughput. And this is a relatively static one; imagine the heavy ones or even video.

In any case, I don't even care much about bandwidth as I have unlimited data, but re-rendering is quite time and CPU consuming when cloning heavy pages. I hear my fans speed up and everything slowing down when all I wanted was preserve 1 KB of data.

Even ignoring bandwidth and CPU/time consumption; cloning a tab straight up doesn't work for dynamic websites/SPAs. E.g. if I clone Twitter feed, the cloned page would often be completely different, and I can't find the link I want to click at all.

Trying to do that for every link I click would literally waste an hour of my time, just to save a few minutes when I finally need that history. Even if none of these issues existed, it would still be too annoying and cumbersome to do hundreds of times a day. (And I hope that you didn't mean "just use the clone tab thing when you will need the history!" If only I had those precognition abilities; then I wouldn't need the clone tab workaround anyway, I would just create a text file saying "Hey debiedowner, some time later today you are going to want to go back to the previous page from https://b.com, but Vivaldi doesn't save tab history and this time the originating tab will be closed or not easy to find, so remember, it was https://a.com!")

rkzn

@debiedowner You probably already do this, but here goes...

One workaround, closer to saving and not requiring precognition :-), is looking for the ancient page in either:

'closed tabs' at 'windows' panel. Good for recently closed, not so good because it only shows the last page of the tab, which may not remind us of which was what. (I got this page from there)
'history' has it all, but it may take a while to find if you do not know exactly what to look for.

debiedowner

@rkzn Yep, like I said in my first post, I look for the originating tab first in the tab bar, then closed tabs list, then history. But if more than a brief time has passed since clicking the link, the search usually fails; so I usually resign myself to not being able to go back, and don't bother if I am on Vivaldi and not Firefox 56.

debiedowner

@DDK I am not sure I understand you correctly, but the full browser history is opened via Ctrl + H shortcut, or clicking Menu -> Tools -> History. If you want history to go back all the way rather than 3 months, change that in Settings -> Privacy -> Save Browsing History. If by full you mean to show all days on a single list rather than the day view where you select which day is shown, click "List" on the upper right.

I find Vivaldi's history to be fine, other than being slow when history is large, and search in history being extremely slow and visually buggy. This request concerns the tab history, i.e. what you get with back/forward buttons.

nomadic

@DDK It definitely shouldn't be only the current tab's history. My best guess is that maybe you have history set to Session Only.

What setting do you have under: Settings → Privacy → Save Browsing History?

@debiedowner This isn't exactly what you are asking for, but I made an extension/mod that can help you get back to the new tab's originating page.

Context Menu Option to Go to "Parent Tab"
Note: It is not only for the context menu. I also added a keyboard shortcut option for the extension.

If the "parent" tab is still open you can get switched back to it, but if it is closed, you only get the "parent" page back in a new tab.

debiedowner

@DDK I don't have a Mac, so I can't check, but are you saying that the History page (from Menu -> Tools -> History, with the address vivaldi://history/) only shows one tab's history? That's weird; on Settings -> Privacy -> Save Browsing History, there is a Session Only option, but even that should show all history in current session, and delete history when you quit Vivaldi, not when you close a tab.

That's interesting because I would love to have a keyboard shortcut for tab history; as far as I know the only way to view tab history on Vivaldi is right-clicking the Back button, it is not accessible via keyboard, which I would prefer. I would be interested if there is a hidden shortcut for that that I don't know.

debiedowner

@nomadic But this is exactly what I am looking for! It is even better than what I asked for from Vivaldi, as I thought it might be too much work, like switching to the parent tab instead of reopening, like the BackTrack Tab History extension I mentioned optionally did. Sure, it's not integrated into the back button / added to the tab history like that extension (I understand that it might not be possible with Chrome extensions API), but the context menu entry + shortcut might be just as good or even better.

I did look for an extension to do something like this, but couldn't find it, so I assumed this was only possible with pre-Quantum Firefox XUL add-ons and not new WebExtensions / Chrome extensions. Somehow I missed this, this is amazing! Thank you vey much!

debiedowner

For reference, before @nomadic's mod, I had found this bookmarklet as a partial solution on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445382

It takes you back to the referrer page, whatever is in the HTTP referer header. The thing is, most websites have origin or origin-when-cross-origin as Referrer-Policy these days, so when I want to find out which search term directed me to this page, I am taken to the search engine's homepage instead! Not very useful, and increasingly less so as Chrome is changing / has changed the default Referrer-Policy to strict-origin-when-cross-origin. I also looked at the extension Referer Control to see if it could solve it, and even though I confirmed that the extension can modify the actual referer header sent to the webpage, for some reason document.referrer property remained unchanged, so the bookmarklet's behavior wasn't improved. Even if it was, I don't think I would have liked to send every website full referer information just to have a little browser functionality.

debiedowner

In case it disappears, the linked bookmarklet is:

javascript:if(!document.referrer)%20alert(%22No%20referrer!%22);%20else%20document.location%20=%20document.referrer;%20void%200

I wholeheartedly agree with the comments there ("This fixes an infuriating missing feature in browsers, where links opened in new tabs lose their history (why?)" ... "You are right, it should be here by default").

Since, like I mentioned, it often opens the referrer page's domain rather than the actual referrer page, I modified it as follows:

javascript:alert(document.referrer); void 0

Often, it's useless, but occasionally it can be helpful, so I used this modified bookmarklet to display what the referer is (instead of automatically opening a probably useless tab), and then navigate to the referrer page myself if I want.

In any case, the mod works much better as it actively records information that the referer header often doesn't; though the bookmarklet might be useful to someone who doesn't want a mod. Still, I wish this was native Vivaldi functionality.

LonM

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