The answer is simple -- each tab has its own separate history, and a newly created tab has no history. In tab 1, you might have a long history of earlier sites

The answer is simple -- each tab has its own separate history, and a newly created tab has no history. In tab 1, you might have a long history of earlier sites. If you create a new tab 2 by any of several means from tab 1, the new tab has no history until you create one, a separate one for that tab. This is generally regarded as a "good thing" -- it means you can have separate histories for different purposes in different tabs. I am sure that, if a new tab inherited the history of its parent tab, someone would complain that that made no sense. And they would be right. > (One hack that I've learned to avoid this problem in desktop Chrome is to duplicate the tab, then click a link regularly. This preserves the back history.) All that does is create a history starting with the original URL that opened the tab. Just as you would expect. It's as though each tab is a separate browser incarnation -- and that's by intent.