Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Partitioning :visited links history (Issue #896)

Hi TAG!

I’m re-opening this issue, as you requested, to give an update regarding our implementation and experimentation for partitioned :visited links.

First, we have heard positive signals from [Firefox](https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1040) and [Safari](https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/363#issuecomment-2200571582) regarding partitioning. Based on this and other feedback from TPAC, we believe that there is multi-stakeholder interest in the feature and plausible consensus on the approach.

Second, we have had positive results from our experiments as well. We’ve run multiple experiments on a percentage of both pre-release and stable traffic since July 11th, 2024 (Chrome Version 128). In addition to nearly 6 months of experiment data, we also began a Developer Trial and added the corresponding self-links flag to ExperimentalWebPlatformFeatures in Chrome Version 133.

During this time, our only bug report was regarding support for context clicks (i.e. right clicking on a link and making it turn purple in a partitioned environment). This functionality was added in Chrome Version 133 and will be part of the model we ship. During these six months of experiments, there have been no changes to Chrome vital metrics including memory footprint, rendering speed, or loading performance. 

Finally, we have found that this partitioning model still captures a good chunk of visited links, within an acceptable threshold. Considering that the goal of this feature is to get rid of any “global” :visited state available to bad actors, we expected a portion of visited links to no longer be shown as :visited under the new partitioning model. We do not believe that user experience is compromised by this reduction, because the core behavior associated with :visited links still remains - “when I click on a link, it turns purple.” What has gone away, in the partitioned model, are all the other times a link turned purple, on sites that a user had never visited before - which was behavior that users may have even found surprising or confusing. Ultimately, we feel this is an acceptable change in user experience to improve user privacy and security.

Thanks! (Also @plinss or @rhiaro the UI says I don't have permission to reopen the issue, so would you be able to do that for me? - thanks so much)


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