The `popstate` Event: Handling Browser History Navigation
The `popstate` event lets your app react to browser back/forward clicks. It's key for SPAs to update views without a full reload. The main footgun: the event fires before the document is fully updated, so your handler might read a stale DOM.
The `popstate` event lets your app react when a user clicks the browser's back/forward buttons, forming the backbone of SPA routing. Instead of a full page reload, your JavaScript can listen for `popstate` to fetch data and render the correct view for the new URL. The main footgun is that the event fires before the document has fully updated. To avoid race conditions where you read a stale DOM, you may need to wrap your handler logic in a `setTimeout(..., 0)` to defer its execution.
Read the original → developer.mozilla.org
- #web apis
- #javascript
- #history api
- #spa
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