Access URLs in the Window's History Object

Question

Is there any way to randomly access the URLs in Javascript's History object in Safari? I'm writing an extension where I need to, on a specifically-formatted page request, capture the URL of the previous page. From what I've been able to find, the History object definition is non-standard across browsers. Safari only seems to expose its length property and the standard methods that actually move within the history. Where other implementations expose current, previous and next properties, I can't see anything that tells me Safari does the same.

I've also tried document.referrer, but that doesn't appear to get populated in this case.

I just need to display the previously accessed URL on a given page. Is there any other way to access that URL?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can't really do this, at least in any white-hat way. By design. You can step the user backward and forward, but you can't see the URLs.

Less scrupulous script-writers have of course taken this as a challenge. I believe the closest they've come is to dynamically write a bunch of known comparison links to the page, and then inspect them to see if they're showing in the "visited" color state. Perhaps if you're working in a closed and predictable environment (an intranet app?), with a known set of URLs, this might be a valid approach for you. Then again, in such an environment you could deal with this on the server side with session management.