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Detect UA Transitions on same-document Navigations

Category
CSS
Type
New or changed feature
Status
Enabled by default (Chrome 118)
Intent stage
Start incubating

Summary

Smooth visual transitions as users navigate on the web can lower cognitive load by helping users stay in context. However, the user experience is bad if both the site author and the UA add these transitions: the transitions may conflict and cause confusion for the user. This API avoids such cases to ensure only one visual transition is executed at a time. The API adds a boolean on `PopStateEvent` and `NavigateEvent` to indicate whether the UA has executed a visual transition for this navigation. Authors can use this to skip their custom transition.

Motivation

Smooth visual transitions as users navigate on the web can lower cognitive load by helping users stay in context. It can also provide a visual cue about the destination before initiating the navigation. Both site authors and user-agents (UAs) add visual transitions to their navigations for these use-cases. However, the user experience is bad if both the site author and the UA add these transitions: the transitions may conflict and cause confusion for the user. The goal of this proposal is to avoid such cases to ensure only one visual transition is executed at a time.

Standards & signals

Explainers: https://github.com/WICG/view-transitions/blob/main/default-ua-transitions.md

View on chromestatus.com