[javascript] Difference between window.location.href=window.location.href and window.location.reload()

What is the difference between JavaScript's

window.location.href = window.location.href

and

window.location.reload()

functions?

from my experience of about 3 years, i could not find any difference...

edit : yes, as one of them here has said, only passing a boolean parameter to window.location.reload() is the difference. if you pass true, then the browser loads a fresh page, but if false, then the cache version is loaded...

Using JSF, I'm now having the issue with refresh after session is expired: PrimeFaces ViewExpiredException after page reload and with some investigation I have found one difference in FireFox:

Calling window.location.reload() works like clicking refresh icon on FF, it adds the line

Cache-Control max-age=0

while setting window.location.href works like pressing ENTER in URL line, it does not send that line.

Though both are sent as GET, the first (reload) is restoring the previous data and the application is in inconsistent state.

The difference is that

window.location = document.URL;

will not reload the page if there is a hash (#) in the URL (with or without something after it), whereas

window.location.reload();

will reload the page.

Came across this question researching some aberrant behavior in IE, specifically IE9, didn't check older versions. It seems

window.location.reload();

results in a refresh that blanks out the entire screen for a second, where as

 window.location = document.URL;

refreshes the page much more quickly, almost imperceptibly.

Doing a bit more research, and some experimentation with fiddler, it seems that window.location.reload() will bypass the cache and reload from the server regardless if you pass the boolean with it or not, this includes getting all of your assets (images, scripts, style sheets, etc) again. So if you just want the page to refresh the HTML, the window.location = document.URL will return much quicker and with less traffic.

A difference in behavior between browsers is that when IE9 uses the reload method it clears the visible page and seemingly rebuilds it from scratch, where FF and chrome wait till they get the new assets and rebuild them if they are different.

If you add the boolean true to the reload window.location.reload(true) it will load from server.

It is not clear how supported this boolean is, W3Org mentions that NS used to support it

There MIGHT be a difference between the content of window.location.href and document.URL - there at least used to be a difference between location.href and the non-standard and deprecated document.location that had to do with redirection, but that is really last millennium.

For documentation purposes I would use window.location.reload() because that is what you want to do.

As said, modifying the href when there is a hash (#) in the url would not reload the page. Thus, I use this to reload it instead of regular expressions:

if (!window.location.hash) {
    window.location.href = window.location.href;
} else {
    window.location.reload();
}

If you say window.location.reload(true) the browser will skip the cache and reload the page from the server. window.location.reload(false) will do the opposite.

Note: default value for window.location.reload() is false

window.location.href, this as saved my life in webview from Android 5.1. The page don't reload with location.reload() in this version from Android.

A difference in Firefox (12.0) is that on a page rendered from a POST, reload() will pop up a warning and do a re-post, while a URL assignment will do a GET.

Google Chrome does a GET for both.

In our case we just want to reload the page in webview and for some reasons we couldn't find out why! We try almost every solution that has been on the web, but stuck with no reloading using location.reload() or alternative solutions like window.location.reload(), location.reload(true), ...!

Here is our simple solution :

Just use a < a > tag with the empty "href" attribution value like this :

< a href="" ...>Click Me</a>

(in some cases you have to use "return true" on click of the target to trigger reload)

For more information check out this question : Is an empty href valid?

No, there shouldn't be. However, it's possible there is differences in some browsers, so either (or neither) may not work in some case.