JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

Name

History — the URL history of the browser

Availability

JavaScript 1.0

Synopsis

                  window.history 
frame.history 
history

Properties

length

This numeric property specifies the number of URLs in the browser’s history list. Since there is no way to determine the index of the currently displayed document within this list, knowing the size of this list is not particularly helpful.

Methods

back( )

Goes backward to a previously visited URL.

forward( )

Goes forward to a previously visited URL.

go( )

Goes to a previously visited URL.

Description

The History object represents the browsing history of a window -- it maintains a list of recently visited web pages. For security and privacy reasons, however, the contents of this list are not accessible to scripts. Although scripts cannot access the URLs represented by the History object, they can use the length property to determine the number of URLs in the list and the back( ), forward( ), and go( ) methods to cause the browser to revisit any of the URLs in the array.

Example

The following line performs the same action as clicking a browser’s Back button:

history.back(  );

The following performs the same action as clicking the Back button twice:

history.go(-2);

See Also

The history property of the Window object, Location