The history object isn’t new; in fact, you can trace its beginnings to the early browsers from the 1990s. While it has never been based on a public standard, until HTML5 that is, every browser has supported its meager, yet sometimes useful, functionality. Since its inception, the history object has provided a means to work with the history of a particular tab in the browser (or a window before tabbed browsing became the norm). This is sometimes referred to as session history.