[email protected]: Prevent websites from changing URLs while scrolling? (like on Discourse for instance)

I want URLs of a page to stay the same no matter where I scroll, including on Discourse where stopping at a certain comment changes the url to that comment's number. Scroll this page to see: https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-url-change-as-you-scroll/55302

4 comments

To avoid this problem on Android, I hold down the back button and click on the previous tab.
window.history.pushState = () => {} window.history.replaceState = () => {}

It'll break PWAs unless you stub it out properly, but you can throw that in a userscript for a quick and dirty way to disable the API that websites use to update the URL without reloading the page.
- And SPAs, probably. I can't imagine anything that relies on React Router to work after this change.
  
  Definitely not.
  
  If I wasn't on mobile, I would write up a more comprehensive fix. Probably something along the lines of:
  
  Store the original functions.
  
  Attach a scroll listener to window.
  
  Stub the functions when the window is scrolled.
  
  Set/reset a timeout for 100ms, and put them back after it fires.