I am pretty sure I am failing to find an answer to this just because I am not using the correct terminology when googling.
In my website I want to display some details about the user's state like selections or filters in the URL so it can be copied and sent to a colleague to replicate the state somewhere else. However, I don't want to enter a state in the history for each change to this so that the back buttons and refresh are affected. I want to make it so that if you navigate to a new place within the website or if you press back/forward/refresh in your browser, the extra parameters (to the extent I chose) will be discarded.
Whenever I try to google for this the topics are always "Change url without reloading page" where I want "Change url text superficially without affecting ANY behavior of the history or browser".
I am developing with GWT so I anticipate that a javascript approach will be most appropriate.