popstate

The popstate event is fired when the active history entry changes. If the history entry being activated was created by a call to history.pushState() or was affected by a call to history.replaceState(), the popstate event's state property contains a copy of the history entry's state object.

Note that just calling history.pushState() or history.replaceState() won't trigger a popstate event. The popstate event is only triggered by doing a browser action such as a click on the back button (or calling history.back() in JavaScript).

Browsers tend to handle the popstate event differently on page load. Chrome (prior to v34) and Safari always emit a popstate event on page load, but Firefox doesn't.

General info

Specification

HTML5

Interface

PopStateEvent

Bubbles

Yes

Cancelable

No

Target

defaultView

Default Action

None

Properties

Browser compatibility

[1] The implementation has limited support.

[2] The implementation in Android 2.2 and 2.3 was buggy.

[3] IE & Edge do not fire the popstate event when the URL's hash value changes, see the bug report.

Example

A page at https://example.com/example.html running the following code will generate logs as indicated:

window.onpopstate = function(event) {
  console.log("location: " + document.location + ", state: " + JSON.stringify(event.state));
};
history.pushState({page: 1}, "title 1", "?page=1");
history.pushState({page: 2}, "title 2", "?page=2");
history.replaceState({page: 3}, "title 3", "?page=3");
history.back(); // Logs "location: https://example.com/example.html?page=1, state: {"page":1}"
history.back(); // Logs "location: https://example.com/example.html, state: null
history.go(2);  // Logs "location: https://example.com/example.html?page=3, state: {"page":3}

Note that even though the original history entry (for https://example.com/example.html) has no state object associated with it, a popstate event is still fired when we activate that entry after the second call to history.back().

Related Events

• hashchange

See Also

• Manipulating the browser history (the History API)