In the LifecycleService you have a startupKind that on electron is used in stuff like the layoutService to determine whether to restore the sidebar contents only on a reload. But on web this is hardcoded to always restore the contents, not just on a reload.

It's possible to detect the navigation type in browsers by doing performance.navigation.type === 1 which would indicate a reload. So I suggest you should read the property, and expose it to under the startupKind property (removing all the hardcoding on the web) so all the features work as expected