[javascript] window.open target _self v window.location.href?

I need to redirect the user using JavaScript. Which is the preferred method?

window.open("webpage.htm", "_self");

or

window.location.href = "webpage.htm";

You can omit window and just use location.href. For example:

location.href = 'http://google.im/';

As others have said, the second approach is usually preferred.

The two code snippets are not exactly equivalent however: the first one actually sets window.opener to the window object itself, whereas the second will leave it as it is, at least under Firefox.

Hopefully someone else is saved by reading this.

We encountered an issue with webkit based browsers doing:

window.open("webpage.htm", "_self");

The browser would lockup and die if we had too many DOM nodes. When we switched our code to following the accepted answer of:

location.href = "webpage.html";

all was good. It took us awhile to figure out what was causing the issue, since it wasn't obvious what made our page periodically fail to load.

Please use this

window.open("url","_self"); 

• The first parameter "url" is full path of which page you want to open.
• The second parameter "_self", It's used for open page in same tab. You want open the page in another tab please use "_blank".

window.location.href = "webpage.htm";