Question

Greetings,

Here’s the problem I’m having. I have a page which redirects directly to another page the first time it is visited. If the user clicks ‘back’, though, the page behaves differently and instead displays content (tracking session IDs to make sure this is the second time the page has been loaded). To do this, I tell the user’s browser to disable caching for the relevant page.

This works well in IE7, but Firefox 3 won’t let me click ‘back’ to a page that resulted in a redirect. I assume it does this to prevent the typical back–>redirect again loop that frustrates so many users. Any ideas for how I may override this behavior?

Alexey

EDIT: The page which we redirect to is an external site over which we have no control. Server-side redirects won’t work because this wouldn’t generate a ‘back’ button for in the browser.

To quote:

Some people in the thread are talking about server-side redirect, and redirect headers (same thing)… keep in mind that we need client-side redirection which can be done in two ways:

a) A META header – Not recommended, and has some problems
b) Javascript, which can be done in at least three ways ("location", "location.href" and "location.replace()")

The server side redirect won’t and shouldn’t activate the back button, and can’t display the typical "You’ll be redirected now" page… so it’s no good (it’s what we’re doing at the moment, actually.. where you’re immediately redirected to the "lucky" page).

Answer 1

You can get around this by creating an iframe and saving the state of the page in a form field in the iframe before doing the redirect. All browsers save the form fields of an iframe.

This page has a really good description of how to get it working. This is the same technique google maps uses when you click on map search results.