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javascript location.hash refreshing in IE

Answer 1

A:

It seems to me that if you change the hash, you are basically changing the location of the page, and so IE (or any browser) would reload. How are you trying to do this? window.location.hash = ""; ?

Maybe Firefox is just smart enough to see what you are doing and avoid the refresh.

Ray 2010-04-08 18:08:09

The thing about hash is that it is not regarded by the browser as a piece of the physical location, it is a client only portion, it does not get sent to servers. It isn't supposed to reload the page in any browser, it is supposed to bring you to an anchor on the page.

aepheus 2010-04-08 18:16:43

Well, I just tried it in IE8 and it negated my answer :) -- I put a couple of buttons on a page. In one, I set window.location.hash to a value - clicking sent me to the anchor. In the other button I set window.location.hash to "" (empty string) - clicking sent me back to the top of the page. In neither case did the page get refreshed from the server. So, if you post the code where you are doing the deed, maybe someone will spot the problem.

Ray 2010-04-08 18:36:45

Answer 2

+2 A:

The problem is that "The hash is coming from else where in the web app via a redirect.". If you use javascript to redirect the url in the client like this:

location.href = 'test1.aspx#testhash'

it will be ok !

So this is the IE bug: When a web app via a redirect, the browser may only see the prev url, so when you modify the location.hash, the browser sees a url change, so refreshes the page.

张小生 2010-05-13 02:33:04

Answer 3

+1 A:

If you use javascript to set the hash don't use a "#"

window.location.hash = '#foo'; //IE will reload the page
window.location.hash = 'foo'; //IE will set the hash but will not reload the page

K.Rijpstra 2010-05-31 09:34:06

Answer 4

+2 A:

This appears to be a bug with Internet Explorer (tested with 7 and 8).

Changing window.location.hash should not result in a reload, and it is a common JavaScript technique to use the hash for maintaining state.

If you manually load a page and change the hash using JavaScript it will work.

The problem is when you are redirected to the page from a different location (ie: using HTTP header "Location"), then modifying the hash will result in a reload.

To get around this bug you could:

1) If you can control the redirect, you could replace the Location header with some HTML.

<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=__REDIRECT_LOCATION__">
    <script>window.location = "__REDIRECT_LOCATION__";</script>
</head>
</html>

2) if not, you could try reloading the page when it is loaded. To prevent a reload loop you may need to set a cookie.

window.location = window.location; // window.location.reload() didn't work.

In pseudo code: 

// if is Internet Explorer
//      if ( cookie "reloadPerformed" is not set )
//          set cookie "reloadPerformed" = "1"
//          reload page
//      else 
//          clear cookie "reloadPerformed"

The obviously drawback is that loading the page results in two page request & render, so you'll would want the reload to be one of the first things the page does when it loads.

Jarne Cook 2010-07-20 01:43:57

Answer 5

A:

@Jarne Cook seems to be right - it is a bug in IE.

You might be able to just do:

<script type="text/javascript">
  window.location.hash = window.location.hash;
</script>

at the top of your page. In normal circumstances, this should be a no-op, but if the user is using IE and has arrived via a redirect, the page will reload before they even notice it has loaded.

rjmunro 2010-09-27 14:14:12

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