Intent to Ship: Navigation: Ignore duplicate navigations

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

rak...@chromium.org, anna...@chromium.org

Explainer

No information provided

Specification

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

Summary

Prevents an ongoing navigation from being unnecessarily canceled by a new, identical navigation that is initiated in quick succession. This optimization improves performance and the user experience by not wasting resources on a duplicate request, which can be caused by accidental double-clicks.

Blink component

UI>Browser>Navigation

Web Feature ID

Missing feature

Motivation

We observe users sometimes navigate to the same URL in quick succession, likely by accident. Because new navigations take precedent over an older one, this means it will waste the earlier navigation that's already in progress, potentially wasting a response that is already in flight for the navigation and causing the user to wait longer (from the time the first navigation kicks off). To mitigate this waste, the feature will ignore the duplicate navigation and let the first navigation continue.

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11743

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1240

TAG review status

Issues open

Goals for experimentation

We have already conducted experimentation which showed positive results in reducing duplicate queries sent to servers.

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

The user-facing behavior will remain identical, as we only target duplicate navigations under specific conditions, such as same URLs and close start times. One minor change to web-exposed behavior is that the initial navigation is now maintained instead of being replaced by the subsequent duplicate request.

Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1307)

WebKit: No signal (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/563)

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

Ergonomics

N/A

Activation

N/A

Security

The feature prevents cross-site leak risks by ensuring that an initiator document cannot detect or infer cookie changes made by other documents. No cross-site state information is ever exposed during the duplicate navigation check.

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

To minimize compatibility risks, navigation callbacks and history entries preserve their legacy behavior, preventing application breakage.

Debuggability

N/A

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes
We are currently rolling out this feature on WebView. On other platforms, the experiment has already concluded and we are shipping it.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Flag name on about://flags

No information provided

Finch feature name

IgnoreDuplicateNavs

Rollout plan

Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://crbug.com/366060351

Launch bug

https://launch.corp.google.com/launch/4428715

Availability expectation

Feature is available only in Chromium browsers. It is not clear if/when other browsers will follow.

Adoption expectation

Feature is considered a best practice for some use case within 12 months of reaching Web Platform baseline.

Non-OSS dependencies

Does the feature depend on any code or APIs outside the Chromium open source repository and its open-source dependencies to function?

No.

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop	151
Shipping on Android	151
Shipping on iOS	151

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

Standard criteria for duplicate navigations are being finalized within the WHATWG HTML specification.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5137490012930048?gate=6446755898064896

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)]

Am I right to assume that this is only web observable on the server?

On Fri, Jul 3, 2026 at 10:15 AM Chromestatus <ad...@cr-status.appspotmail.com> wrote:

Contact emails

rak...@chromium.org, anna...@chromium.org

Explainer

No information provided

Specification

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

Did we get any feedback on the PR? 

Could we write WPTs for this feature?

 

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