Question

Is it possible to fire events picked up by a separate browser window? With JavaScript perhaps.

i.e. if my website opened up another window to display summary product information, would it be possible to notify that window to update when a different product is selected in the main window?

Needs to work in IE, but doesn’t need to work on Chrome or other browsers.

Answer 1

There are a couple of options.

1. Cross-Document-Messaging allows you to pass events between windows. For this to work, you need to have a handle of the target window, which you can really only acquire if the target is either an <iframe> (e.g. through window.frames, or window.parent from the iframe’s POV) or if the target is a window opened by the current window through window.open() or window.opener from the popup’s POV.
2. Shared Workers can connect otherwise unassociated windows much like Cross-Document-Messaging. Shared Workers are only available in Chrome and Safari, though.
3. Server-Sent Events could use the server to proxy the communication between your otherwise unassociated windows. This reqires a round-trip to the server (so is not entirely client-based) and is not available in Internet Explorer.
4. Web Sockets are an option, too. They too suffer from a server round trip and are not available in Internet Explorer. There is socket.io, which polyfills this functionality down to old Internet Explorers – so might be a viable solution.
5. A hacky solution is abusing LocalStorage. It’ll work in modern Browsers and IE8.
6. jQuery BrowserEvent was something I played with way back when. It abuses the window.event and browsers’ local storage capabilites to simulate passing events between browsers. This is nothing you’d want to use in a production environment, though.

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German fellows may want to check out Kommunikations-APIs in HTML5 – Welche wann nutzen?