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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T20:27:02+00:00

I’m working on a Google Chrome extension that manipulates a webpage, but after it

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I’m working on a Google Chrome extension that manipulates a webpage, but after it is either partially loaded (the DOM) or fully loaded (with images).

It seems that many sites nowadays use the 

<!DOCTYPE html>

declaration, or some variation of it, but many others do not. The question is mainly about HTML doctypes…I’m not sure about the others.

Is it safe to assume that if a webpage does not have the DOCTYPE declaration, then $(window).load(); will not be fired?

In the beginning I was using $(document).ready(); (for when the DOM is loaded), but later switched to $(window).load(); (to let the images load too).

The thing is, now $(window).load(); does not seem to work if there is no DOCTYPE. $(document).ready(); seems to work on all pages, regardless of whether a DOCTYPE is declared or not.

Maybe this can be useful for others with this same issue. I searched a bit and didn’t find a decisive answer. It seems that I will end up using something like this:

if (window.document.doctype != null) {$(window).load(checkEntries);}
if (window.document.doctype == null) {$(document).ready(checkEntries);}

I guess my question is… Is this normal to have to check for the DOCTYPE to know which event to use? Or am I missing something here?

Basically, why does $(window).load(); seem not to fire if there’s no DOCTYPE declaration?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Basically, you shouldn’t be using $(window).load(), since it’s not fully supported. If you really need it, then your solution above is the best you can do. The jQuery page sums up the caveats nicely:

    Caveats of the load event when used with images

    A common challenge developers attempt to solve using the .load()
    shortcut is to execute a function when an image (or collection of
    images) have completely loaded. There are several known caveats with
    this that should be noted. These are:

    • It doesn’t work consistently nor reliably cross-browser
    • It doesn’t fire correctly in WebKit if the image src is set to the same src as before
    • It doesn’t correctly bubble up the DOM tree
    • Can cease to fire for images that already live in the browser’s cache

    URL: http://api.jquery.com/load-event/

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