Contribution year selection creates multiple browser history entries

[intrance7]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Body

What are you trying to do?

I was exploring a GitHub user's contribution history and switching
between different contribution years.

For example, I selected:

2024 → 2023 → 2022 → 2021 → 2020

What did you expect to happen?

I expected the browser's Back button to take me back to the previous
meaningful page I was visiting.

I understand that having the selected contribution year reflected in
the URL is useful for sharing, bookmarking, and refreshing the page.

However, I would expect changing the contribution year to behave more
like changing a view/filter rather than creating a separate browser
history entry for every year selected.

Since users can directly select any preferred contribution year from
the year selector, there is little reason to use the browser's Back
button to revisit a previously viewed year. The Back button would
generally be expected to return to the previous page or meaningful
navigation state rather than cycling through years that were selected
during exploration.

What happened instead?

Each contribution-year selection appears to create a new browser
history entry.

As a result, after switching through several years, pressing the
browser's Back button takes me through every previously selected year
before returning to the page I was originally visiting.

For example:

2020 → 2021 → 2022 → 2023 → 2024

Then pressing Back results in:

2024 → 2023 → 2022 → 2021 → 2020 → previous page

This becomes inconvenient when exploring multiple years.

Possible improvement

Could the contribution-year selector update the URL while avoiding a
new browser history entry for every year selection?

This would preserve the benefits of having the selected year in the
URL while making the browser's Back button more predictable and useful.

I'm sharing this as a UX improvement based on my experience while
using GitHub.

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[kapilrao2007-dotcom]

Agreed. The Back button behavior is a little annoying when browsing multiple years