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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T00:26:33+00:00

I’d like to dynamically change some of the standard JS DOM objects from within

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I’d like to dynamically change some of the standard JS DOM objects from within a web browser.

For instance, when I execute:

var site = location;

I want to specify a new value for my browser’s “window.location” object other than the “correct” one (the URL used to access the requested page) at run time, either through a debugger-like interface or even programmatically if need be.

Although Firebug advertises the capability to do something similar via its “DOM Inspector,” whenever I try to modify any of the DOM values while I’ve paused the Javascript via its debugger, it simply ignores the new value I enter. After doing some research, it seems that this is a known issue according to this bug report: http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=1707 .

Theoretically, I could write a program to simply open up an HTTP socket and emulate a browser “user agent,” but this seems like a lot of trouble for my purposes. While I’m asking, does anyone know a good Java/C# library with functions/objects that emulate HTTP headers and parse the received HTML/JS? I’ve long dreamt about the existence of such a library but most of the ones I’ve tried (Java’s Apache HttpClient, C#’s System.Net.HttpWebRequest) are far too low-level to make anything worthwhile with minimal planning and a short period of time.

Thanks in advance for recommendations and advice you can provide!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Not sure if I understand you correctly, but if you want to change the loaded URL you can do that by setting window.location.href.
    If your intent is to replace DOM buildins then you will be sad to hear, that most build-in objects (host objects) aren’t regular JavaScript objects and their behaviour is not clearly defined. Some browsers may allow you to replace and/or extend some objects while in other browsers they won’t be replaceable/extendable at all.

    If you want to “script a browser” using JavaScript, you should definitly have a look at node.js and it’s http module. There’s also a thirdparty module called html5 that simulates the DOM in node.js and even allows the usage of jQuery.

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