javascript - Reading window.history.state object in Webkit

Question

Safari and Chrome (and, I'm guessing, all Webkit browsers) do not respond to window.history.state which is specified in the evolving HTML5 standard here and is implemented in Firefox.

Is there a workaround to read it? Perhaps it is possible to trigger a popstate event in code and return the state from the event handler?

Answer 1

I ran into this issue yesterday. I didn't need a cross browser solution since the target platform is running an oldish version of WebKit, so I created a quick and simple polyfill for history.state in WebKit:

// Polyfill for history.state in older webkit engines
if (!history.hasOwnProperty('state')) {
    (function (push, rep) {
        // history.state is always initialised to null
        history.state = null;

        history.pushState = function (state) {
            push.apply(history, arguments);

            history.state = state;
        };
        history.replaceState = function (state) {
            rep.apply(history, arguments);

            history.state = state;
        };

        window.addEventListener('popstate', function (e) {
            history.state = e.state;
        }, true);

    })(history.pushState, history.replaceState);
}