For all major browsers (except IE), the JavaScript onload event doesn’t fire when the page loads as a result of a back button operation — it only fires when the page is first loaded.
Can someone point me at some sample cross-browser code (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE, …) that solves this problem? I’m familiar with Firefox’s pageshow event but unfortunately neither Opera nor Safari implement this.
Bill, I dare answer your question, however I am not 100% sure with my guesses. I think other then IE browsers when taking user to a page in history will not only load the page and its resources from cache but they will also restore the entire DOM (read session) state for it. IE doesn't do DOM restoration (or at lease did not do) and thus the onload event looks to be necessary for proper page re-initialization there.
OK, I tried this and it works in Firefox 3, Safari 3.1.1, and IE7 but not in Opera 9.52.
If you use the example shown below (based on palehorse's example), you get an alert box pop-up when the page first loads. But if you then go to another URL, and then hit the Back button to go back to this page, you don't get an alert box pop-up in Opera (but you do in the other browsers).
Anyway, I think this is close enough for now. Thanks everyone!
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">
<script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(
function(){
alert('test');
}
);
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Test of the page load event and the Back button using jQuery</h1>
</body>
</html>