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Asked: 2026-05-10T18:21:07+00:00

For all major browsers (except IE), the JavaScript onload event doesn’t fire when the

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For all major browsers (except IE), the JavaScript onload event doesn’t fire when the page loads as a result of a back button operation — it only fires when the page is first loaded.

Can someone point me at some sample cross-browser code (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE, …) that solves this problem? I’m familiar with Firefox’s pageshow event but unfortunately neither Opera nor Safari implement this.

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  1. Guys, I found that JQuery has only one effect: the page is reloaded when the back button is pressed. This has nothing to do with ‘ready‘.

    How does this work? Well, JQuery adds an onunload event listener.

    // http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js jQuery(window).bind('unload', function() { // ...

    By default, it does nothing. But somehow this seems to trigger a reload in Safari, Opera and Mozilla — no matter what the event handler contains.

    [edit(Nickolay): here’s why it works that way: webkit.org, developer.mozilla.org. Please read those articles (or my summary in a separate answer below) and consider whether you really need to do this and make your page load slower for your users.]

    Can’t believe it? Try this:

    <body onunload=''><!-- This does the trick --> <script type='text/javascript'>     alert('first load / reload');     window.onload = function(){alert('onload')}; </script> <a href='http://stackoverflow.com'>click me, then press the back button</a> </body>

    You will see similar results when using JQuery.

    You may want to compare to this one without onunload

    <body><!-- Will not reload on back button --> <script type='text/javascript'>     alert('first load / reload');     window.onload = function(){alert('onload')}; </script> <a href='http://stackoverflow.com'>click me, then press the back button</a> </body>
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