Individual tab histories do not persist between sessions

[TartanSpartan]

Device: Agnostic (any device, any channel)

Steps to reproduce:

Open browser, navigate forward by clicking a link (or by writing links in the URL bar) in a tab, repeat X times, close browser.

Expected behaviour:

We expect any mobile and desktop browser e.g. Chromium, Firefox, the original UT web browser etc. to retain the tab history for X links in the navigation chain and recreate them between sessions so that users can navigate through each tab's history as they please.

Current behaviour:

This isn't achieved. Tabs only keep a record of the page you most recently navigated to. This is awkward if for example, you found an interesting search via a search engine, but you clicked on the first link then closed the browser and so you only have a direct, easy record (without taking the extra step of going to the browser history record) of said first link instead of the full interesting search.

[TartanSpartan]

With major system and UI enhancements having been deployed in OTA-12, could quality of life enhancements such as this issue please now be prioritised and addressed for upcoming OTAs? It is one of the only things holding me back from upgrading all my devices to the latest stable image.

[TartanSpartan]

How about for OTA-14, if possible? @balcy

[kugiigi]

I've checked on this and sadly, it seems that QtWebEnigine doesn't currently support restoring navigation history since it's a read-only property. Even news versions doesn't seem to support it either so not sure if we'll get it soon. I'm thinking of maybe just making our own implementation of navigation history but it may be messy. I may experiment on this in the future.

Falkon supports this which is using QtWebEngine too but it's mostly C++ so perhaps it's possible there. Haven't dig into their code much though since I'm not good with C++ 😅

[TartanSpartan]

That's a curious revelation. Why does QtWebEngine designate navigation history as a read-only property? Why would the developers of the toolkit make this an inherent, restrictive feature? And would this Stack Exchange page be relevant to the issue?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51687078/qt-web-engine-get-history/51687177

[kugiigi]

That seems to be only for getting the history in C++. Accessing them is easy, restoring them is the problem. I guess Qt developers didn't thought of restoring tabs.

[TartanSpartan]

Is there a repo for raising issues in QtWebEngine?