Track when user hits back button on the browser

Question

Is it possible to detect when the user clicks on the browser\'s back button?

I have an Ajax application and if I can detect when the user clicks on the back button I

Answer 1

The simplest way to check if you came back to a cached version of your page, which needs to be refreshed, is to add a hidden input element that will be cached, and you can check if it still has its default value.

Just place the following inside your body tag. I place mine right before the end tag.

<input type="hidden" id="needs-refresh" value="no">
<script>
    onload=function(){
        var e = document.getElementById("needs-refresh");
        if (e.value === "yes")
            location.reload();
        e.value = "yes";
    }
</script>

Answer 2

There's no way to tell when a user clicks the back button of presses the backspace key to go back in the browser, however there are other events that happen in a certain order which are detectable. This example javascript has a reasonably good method for detecting back commands:

The traditional way, however, is to track user movement through your site using cookies or referrer pages. When the user goes to page A, then page B, then appears at page A again (especially when there's no link on B to A) then you know they went back - A can detect this and redirect them or otherwise.

Answer 3

One of my favorite frameworks for doing this is Yahoo!'s Browser History Manager. You register events and it calls you back when the user returns Back to that state. And if you want to learn how it works, here's a fun blog entry about the decisions Yahoo! made when designing it.

Answer 4

I set a variable $wasPosted in $_SESSION with value false.

All my posts go via the same php file, and set $wasPosted to true.

All header(location:) requests are preceded by setting $wasPosted to true.

If $wasPosted is false then the page was loaded after use of the backward or forward buttons.

Answer 5

The Yahoo User Interface Library, my personal favorite client-side JS library, has an excellent Browser History Manager that does exactly what you're asking for.

Answer 6

There are multiple ways of doing it, though some will only work in certain browsers. One that I know off the top of my head is to embed a tiny near-invisible iframe on the page. When the user hits the back button the iframe is navigated back which you can detect and then update your page. Here is another solution.

You might also want to go view source on something like gmail and see how they do it.

Here's a library for the sort of thing you're looking for by the way