Google Chrome stores a transition value which identifies the type of transition between pages. These are stored in the history database to separate visits, and are reported by the renderer for page navigations.
| SQLite Database | History |
|---|---|
| Table Name | visits |
| Field Name | transition |
Core
A type is made of a core value and a set of qualifiers. A type has one core value and 0 or more qualifiers. Table 1 contains the core values.
| Identifier | Information |
|---|---|
| LINK | User got to this page by clicking a link on another page. |
| TYPED | User got to this page by typing the URL in the URL bar. Should not be used for cases where the user selected a choice that didn't look at all like a URL; see GENERATED below. Also used for other "explicit" navigation actions. |
| AUTO_BOOKMARK | User got to this page through a suggestion in the UI, for example, through the Destinations page. |
| AUTO_SUBFRAME | This is a subframe navigation. This is any content that is automatically loaded in a non-toplevel frame. For example, if a page consists of several frames containing ads, those ad URLs will have this transition type. The user may not even realise the content in these pages is a separate frame, so may not care about the URL (see MANUAL below). |
| MANUAL_SUBFRAME | For subframe navigations that are explicitly requested by the user and generate new navigation entries in the back/forward list. These are probably more important than frames that were automatically loaded in the background because the user probably cares about the fact that this link was loaded. |
| GENERATED | User got to this page by typing in the URL bar and selecting an entry that did not look like a URL. For example, a match might have the URL of a Google search result page, but appear like "Search Google for ...". These are not quite the same as TYPED navigations because the user didn't type or see the destination URL. See also KEYWORD. |
| START_PAGE | The page was specified in the command line or is the start page. |
| FORM_SUBMIT | The user filled out values in a form and submitted it. NOTE that in some situations submitting a form does not result in this transition type. This can happen if the form uses script to submit the contents. |
| RELOAD | The user "reloaded" the page, either by hitting the reload button or by hitting enter in the address bar. NOTE that this is distinct from the concept of whether a particular load uses "reload semantics" (i.e. bypasses cached data). SessionRestore and undo tab close also use this transition type. |
| KEYWORD | The url was generated from a replaceable keyword other than the default search provider. If the user types a keyword (which also applies to tab-to-search) in the omnibox this qualifier is applied to the transition type of the generated url. An additional visit with a transition type of KEYWORD_GENERATED may then be generated against the url 'http://' + keyword. For example, if the user does a tab-to-search against wikipedia the generated url has a transition qualifer of KEYWORD and a visit for 'wikipedia.org' is also generated with a transition type of KEYWORD_GENERATED. |
| KEYWORD_GENERATED | Corresponds to a visit generated for a keyword. See description of KEYWORD for more details. |
Table 1
Qualifiers
Any of the core values above can be augmented by one or more qualifiers. These qualifiers further define the transition. Table 2 contains the qualifier values.
| Identifier | Information |
|---|---|
| FORWARD_BACK | User used the Forward or Back button to navigate among browsing history. |
| FROM_ADDRESS_BAR | User used the address bar to trigger this navigation. |
| HOME_PAGE | User is navigating to the home page. |
| CHAIN_START | The beginning of a navigation chain. |
| CHAIN_END | The last transition in a redirect chain. |
| CLIENT_REDIRECT | Redirects caused by JavaScript or a meta refresh tag on the page. |
| SERVER_REDIRECT | Redirects sent from the server by HTTP headers. |
| IS_REDIRECT_MASK | Used to test whether a transition involves a redirect. |
Table 2