How can I ignore window.onpopstate on page load?

Question 1

I’m playing with window.onpopstate, and there is a thing that annoys me a little bit:

Browsers tend to handle the popstate event differently on page load.
Chrome and Safari always emit a popstate event on page load, but
Firefox doesn’t.

source

I tested it, and yeah, in Chrome and Safari 5.1+ the popstate event is fired on page load, but not in Firefox or IE10.

The problem is, that I want to listen only to popstate events where user clicked the back or forward button (or the history was changed via javascript), but don’t want to do anything on pageload.

By other words I want to differentiate the popstate event from page load from the other popstate events.

This is what I tried so far (I’m using jQuery):

$(function() {
  console.log('document ready');

  setTimeout(function() {
    window.onpopstate = function(event) {
      // Do something here
    }, 10);
});

Basically I try to bind my listener function to popstate late enough to be not bound on page load, only later.

This seems to work, however, I don’t like this solution. I mean, how can I be sure that the timeout chosen for setTimeout is big enough, but not too big (because I don’t want it to wait too much).

I hope there is a smarter solution!

Question 2

Check for boolean truth of event.state in popstate event handler:

window.addEventListener('popstate', function(event) {
    if (event.state) {
        alert('!');
    }
}, false);

To ensure this will work, always specify a non-null state argument when calling history.pushState() or history.replaceState(). Also, consider using a wrapper library like History.js that provides consistent behavior across browsers.

Question 3

I had a similar problem and i had to validate to make sure if page was loaded completely.

I used something like this :

var page_loaded = false;    
window.onpopstate = function(event){
    if(!page_loaded){
       page_loaded = true;
       return false;
     }
    //Continue With Your Code
}

Question 4

To react on popstate event, you need to push some state onto the session history.

For example add this line to the document ready section:

history.pushState(null, null, window.location.pathname);

Not ideal, but it works in Chrome, Firefox and other browsers as well.

Then the event is fired correctly when user clicks on Back or Forward button, also when history.back(), history.forward(), history.go() methods are called manually. Each time when popstate has been invoked, you have to push another state again to make it working.

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