Angular's location provider stalls links to the current URL, i.e. window.location. As soon as the $location service is activated in an Angular app, it will intercept links. The click event handler is registered in $LocationProvider.$get().

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The motivation is reasonable, as they want to keep the Browser history clean when Angular is controlling it. However, when Angular is NOT controlling your interaction with the browser history (i.e. you're just using Angular as JS sugar on your page), Angular will create the above issue as soon as you use anything that depends on the location service, e.g. ngInclude.

We do not currently know how to circumvent that.