Question

I have a web app with some ‘safety’ code which causes a page reload if the server (Socket.IO) connection goes silent for more than 5 seconds (generally customer site firewall/broken-proxy issues).

The Socket.IO connection stops as soon a new page starts loading, but the safety code doesn’t see this. Navigating to a slow page causes the safety code to fire and jump you back to the previous page.

I need to be able to tell (just before this code causes a reload) whether the browser is currently waiting for a new (slow) page to load.

What approaches are there to doing this, other than putting a jQuery click event on every link (which would not catch navigation via the address bar)?

Thanks,

Chris.

Answer 1

Monitoring window.onbeforeunload would do the trick. Fires right after the user starts navigating away.

Try typing this in the Chrome Console on any page and click on any link:

window.onbeforeunload = function () { console.log("oh noes"); }