Which is more widely supported: window.onload
or document.onload
?
Add Event Listener
<script type="text/javascript">
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(event) {
// - Code to execute when all DOM content is loaded.
// - including fonts, images, etc.
});
</script>
Update March 2017
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
console.log('All assets are loaded')
})
$(window).on('load', function() {
console.log('All assets are loaded')
})
In short
window.onload
is not supported by IE 6-8document.onload
is not supported by any modern browser (event is never fired)window.onload = () => console.log('window.onload works'); // fired
document.onload = () => console.log('document.onload works'); // not fired
The general idea is that window.onload fires when the document's window is ready for presentation and document.onload fires when the DOM tree (built from the markup code within the document) is completed.
Ideally, subscribing to DOM-tree events, allows offscreen-manipulations through Javascript, incurring almost no CPU load. Contrarily, window.onload
can take a while to fire, when multiple external resources have yet to be requested, parsed and loaded.
►Test scenario:
To observe the difference and how your browser of choice implements the aforementioned event handlers, simply insert the following code within your document's - <body>
- tag.
<script language="javascript">
window.tdiff = []; fred = function(a,b){return a-b;};
window.document.onload = function(e){
console.log("document.onload", e, Date.now() ,window.tdiff,
(window.tdiff[0] = Date.now()) && window.tdiff.reduce(fred) );
}
window.onload = function(e){
console.log("window.onload", e, Date.now() ,window.tdiff,
(window.tdiff[1] = Date.now()) && window.tdiff.reduce(fred) );
}
</script>
►Result:
Here is the resulting behavior, observable for Chrome v20 (and probably most current browsers).
document.onload
event.onload
fires twice when declared inside the <body>
, once when declared inside the <head>
(where the event then acts as document.onload
).window.onload
event handler within the confines of the HTML-<head>
element.►Example Project:
The code above is taken from this project's codebase (index.html
and keyboarder.js
).
For a list of event handlers of the window object, please refer to the MDN documentation.
According to Parsing HTML documents - The end,
The browser parses the HTML source and runs deferred scripts.
A DOMContentLoaded
is dispatched at the document
when all the HTML has been parsed and have run. The event bubbles to the window
.
The browser loads resources (like images) that delay the load event.
A load
event is dispatched at the window
.
Therefore, the order of execution will be
DOMContentLoaded
event listeners of window
in the capture phaseDOMContentLoaded
event listeners of document
DOMContentLoaded
event listeners of window
in the bubble phaseload
event listeners (including onload
event handler) of window
A bubble load
event listener (including onload
event handler) in document
should never be invoked. Only capture load
listeners might be invoked, but due to the load of a sub-resource like a stylesheet, not due to the load of the document itself.
window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
console.log('window - DOMContentLoaded - capture'); // 1st
}, true);
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
console.log('document - DOMContentLoaded - capture'); // 2nd
}, true);
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
console.log('document - DOMContentLoaded - bubble'); // 2nd
});
window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
console.log('window - DOMContentLoaded - bubble'); // 3rd
});
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
console.log('window - load - capture'); // 4th
}, true);
document.addEventListener('load', function(e) {
/* Filter out load events not related to the document */
if(['style','script'].indexOf(e.target.tagName.toLowerCase()) < 0)
console.log('document - load - capture'); // DOES NOT HAPPEN
}, true);
document.addEventListener('load', function() {
console.log('document - load - bubble'); // DOES NOT HAPPEN
});
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
console.log('window - load - bubble'); // 4th
});
window.onload = function() {
console.log('window - onload'); // 4th
};
document.onload = function() {
console.log('document - onload'); // DOES NOT HAPPEN
};
window.onload
In some browsers it now takes over the role of document.onload
and fires when the DOM is ready as well.
document.onload
window.onload
appears to be the most widely supported. In fact, some of the most modern browsers have in a sense replaced document.onload
with window.onload
.
Browser support issues are most likely the reason why many people are starting to use libraries such as jQuery to handle the checking for the document being ready, like so:
$(document).ready(function() { /* code here */ });
$(function() { /* code here */ });
For the purpose of history. window.onload
vs body.onload
:
A similar question was asked on codingforums a while back regarding the usage of
window.onload
overbody.onload
. The result seemed to be that you should usewindow.onload
because it is good to separate your structure from the action.
window.onload however they are often the same thing. Similarly body.onload becomes window.onload in IE.