Should I use window.navigate or document.location in JavaScript?

Question

What's the preferred method to use to change the location of the current web page using JavaScript? I've seen both window.navigate and document.location used. Are there any differences in behavior? Are there differences in browser implementations?

Answer 1

window.location.href = 'URL';

is the standard implementation for changing the current window's location.

Answer 2

window.navigate not supported in some browser

In java script many ways are there for redirection, see the below code and explanation

window.location.href = "http://krishna.developerstips.com/";
window.location = "http://developerstips.com/";
window.location.replace("http://developerstips.com/");
window.location.assign("http://work.developerstips.com/");

window.location.href loads page from browser's cache and does not always send the request to the server. So, if you have an old version of the page available in the cache then it will redirect to there instead of loading a fresh page from the server.

window.location.assign() method for redirection if you want to allow the user to use the back button to go back to the original document.

window.location.replace() method if you want to want to redirect to a new page and don't allow the user to navigate to the original page using the back button.

Answer 3

window.location will affect to your browser target. document.location will only affect to your browser and frame/iframe.

Answer 4

window.location also affects to the frame,

the best form i found is:

parent.window.location.href

And the worse is:

parent.document.URL 

I did a massive browser test, and some rare IE with several plugins get undefined with the second form.

Answer 5

document.location is a (deprecated but still present) read-only string property, replaced by document.URL.

Answer 6

window.navigate is NOT supported in some browsers, so that one should be avoided. Any of the other methods using the location property are the most reliable and consistent approach

Answer 7

I'd go with window.location = "http://...";. I've been coding cross-browser JavaScript for a few years, and I've never experienced problems using this approach.

window.navigate and window.location.href seems a bit odd to me.

Answer 8

Late joining this conversation to shed light on a mildly interesting factoid for web-facing, analytics-aware websites. Passing the mic over to Michael Papworth:

https://github.com/michaelpapworth/jQuery.navigate

"When using website analytics, window.location is not sufficient due to the referer not being passed on the request. The plugin resolves this and allows for both aliased and parametrised URLs."

If one examines the code what it does is this:

   var methods = {
            'goTo': function (url) {
                // instead of using window.location to navigate away
                // we use an ephimeral link to click on and thus ensure
                // the referer (current url) is always passed on to the request
                $('<a></a>').attr("href", url)[0].click();
            },
            ...
   };

Neato!

Answer 9

There really isn't a difference; there are about 5 different methods of doing it. However, the ones I see most often are document.location and window.location because they're supported by all major browsers. (I've personally never seen window.navigate used in production code, so maybe it doesn't have very good support?)

Answer 10

support for document.location is also good though its a deprecated method. I've been using this method for a while with no problems. you can refer here for more details:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/document.location

Answer 11

You can move your page using

window.location.href =Url;