> with basically zero legitimate use cases -- the only use case I can think of is telling the browser certain actions should not push themselves onto the back b

> with basically zero legitimate use cases -- the only use case I can think of is telling the browser certain actions should not push themselves onto the back button stack). I agree on the "legitimate" part, but I suspect one of the main reasons is that Google and Apple both really want people to be creating SPAs that pretend to be real apps, and that's hard to do without being able to hijack the back button for navigation.