Question

I’m trying to use this jQuery postMessage plugin to pass messages between a couple of windows. While it’s working great under FF/Chrome, it just doesn’t seem to work under IE8 nor IE9.
The line I’m using is:

$.postMessage('hello world', opener.location.toString(), opener);

In IE8, I get the following error message:

No such interface supported
jquery.ba-postmessage.js
Code: 0
line: 112
char: 7

I can’t really figure out what I’m doing wrong. I noticed this library is a bit outdated (though it does say to be working on IE8), so I tried downloading jquery-1.3.2 which it is said to be working on, and it still didn’t work.

Any tips about how to solve this (or possibly any references to other cross-browser libraries with the same ability) will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

This appears to be a limitation of Internet Explorer. postMessage will only work between frames of the same page, not between windows or tabs.

For more information, see:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thebeebs/archive/2011/12/21/postmessage-popups-and-ie.aspx

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2009/09/16/bugs-in-ie8-support-for-html5-postmessage-sessionstorage-and-localstorage.aspx (Issue #1)