What's the difference between [removed] and [removed] in JavaScript?

Question

Should both of them reference the same object?

Answer 1

document.location was originally a read-only property, although Gecko browsers allow you to assign to it as well. For cross-browser safety, use window.location instead.

Read more:

document.location

window.location

Answer 2

window.location is the more reliably consistent of the two, considering older browsers.

Answer 3

Interestingly, if you have a frame, image, or form named 'location', then 'document.location' provides a reference to the frame window, image, or form, respectively, instead of the Location object. Apparently, this is because the document.forms, document.images, and window.frames collection name lookup gets priority over the mapping to window.location.

<img name='location' src='location.png'>

if (document.location.tagName == 'IMG') alert('Hello!')

Answer 4

It's rare to see the difference nowadays because html 5 don't support framesets anymore. But back at the time we have frameset, document.location would redirect only the frame in which code is being executed, and window.location would redirect the entire page.