From the browsers perspective those are the same thing though. It’s a paradigm boundary.
The real answer is to have desktop applications that work like applications (buttons do what feels right), and websites that work like websites.
SPA, is a page application. Pages aren’t applications, applications aren’t pages. AutoCAD is an app, the Robotech Encyclopedia is content.
> From the browsers perspective those are the same thing though.
If the browser only allows adding at most one history item per click, I should be able to go back to where I entered a given site with at most that many back button clicks.
At a first glance, this doesn't seem crazy hard to implement? I'm probably missing some edge cases, though.