getLocationAbsUrl vs getCurrentUrl

Question

In protractor, globally available browser object has two methods:

• getLocationAbsUrl()

Returns the current absolute url f

Answer 1

Basically they should do the same thing, return the URL of the page.

From this bug report:

https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/132

it seems that IEDriver for Selenium was always returning the first loaded page, not the current one. So the protractor team implemented a JS call to Angular's $location to always return the URL correctly via Javascript, not Webdriver protocol.