Nobody implements isReloadNavigation

[domenic]

See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=836697, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1456479, and https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184957 .

It's been a couple of years without movement. Should we remove it from the spec? @yutakahirano @wanderview @youennf @asutherland.

[wanderview]

@yutakahirano is there still a blocking implementation issue for this?

[yutakahirano]

Sorry for the inactivity. I originally planned to implement it, but due to an implementation issue specific to Chrome isReloadNavigation implementation is harder than isHistoryNavigation, and I haven't had time to implement it.

I'm OK with removing it given nobody has implemented it.

[wanderview]

I guess I'm concerned with removing it. We originally added isReloadNavigation to the spec because isReload was poorly defined and there was confusion around it. If we want to stick with the older isReload then we need to better define it as only reflecting navigation reload status I think.

[domenic]

I think neither isReloadNavigation or isReload should be in the spec because nobody implemented it and we apparently don't have 2 implementers interested in doing so, which is a requirement for things to be in the spec.

[domenic]

(Correction: Chrome implemented and ships isReload apparently, but nobody else does. Still doesn't meet the bar for keeping it in the spec.)

[wanderview]

I believe there are real site use cases that needed a "is this a reload of the page" signal. That is why we haven't been able to remove isReload() yet in chrome.

[asutherland]

Firefox is still willing to implement this based on the original motivations. As is visible in our implementation bug, our implementation stalled on some testing issues and was shelved as we re-focused on our long-term process-model refactor (since addressed), but I believe the testing issues are now hopefully moot (history) or we know how to side-step the issues (pref).

That said, it's not clear we can immediately allocate resources to cleaning up and landing the implementation. Given that it seems like the original rationale of w3c/ServiceWorker#1167 still stands, would it be appropriate to git stash this portion of the spec until browsers are ready to implement?

[wanderview]

@yutakahirano Can you share what the implementation difficulties were with implementing isReloadNavigation on the crbug? I might be able to devote some time in the coming quarters to implementing this.