#1240: WG New Spec: Ignore Duplicate Navigations

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Opened Jun 22, 2026

Specification

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11765

Explainer

https://

Links

  • The WG's request for this TAG review: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11743
  • Previous early design review, if any: n/a
  • An introduction to the feature, aimed at unfamiliar audiences: This feature enhances performance by discarding duplicate navigation requests that occur within a brief (3 second) window, preventing the unnecessary cancellation of ongoing navigations.
  • A description of the problems that end-users were facing before this proposal: Accidental duplicate actions, such as rapid double-clicking, currently trigger the cancellation of progressing navigations, resulting in redundant network connection and delays.
  • Alternatives considered: Alternatives such as navigation transformation or pipe transfer were rejected due to complexity (see TPAC 2025 presentation).
  • Examples of how to use the proposal to solve the end-users' problems: This is a transparent browser optimization.
  • What do the end-users experience with this proposal: Users experience faster and smoother page loads because their initial navigation intent is preserved even if they accidentally click a link multiple times.
  • User research you did to validate the problem and/or design, if any: Chrome experimentation showed a decrease in navigations marked as exact duplicates, and a more significant reduction in the number of server responses that were sent but potentially never rendered. This also improves overall latency.
  • Web Platform Tests:

The specification

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

  • GitHub repo: https://github.com/whatwg/html
  • Primary contacts:
    • Anna Sato (@llannasatoll), Google
    • Rakina Zata Amni (@rakina), Google, $role in developing specification
  • Organization/project driving the specification: Google Chrome team
  • This work is being funded by: Google
  • Primary standards group developing this feature: WHATWG
  • Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design:
    • W3C / WHATWG "WHATUP" (TPAC 2025 session)

Feedback so far

  • Active horizontal reviews: n/a <!-- Link to an issue like https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/issues/239, https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/issues/1804, or https://github.com/w3c/did/issues/885, which itself links to the other horizontal reviews. If you haven't started the rest of the horizontal reviews, please consider doing so. -->
  • Multi-stakeholder feedback:
  • Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification: No stated opposition.
  • Status/issue trackers for implementations:
    • Chrome Status
    • WebKit's Bugzilla (none, yet)
    • Mozilla's (none, yet)

You should also know that...

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