I need to somehow detect that the user has pressed a browsers back button and reload the page with refresh (reloading the content and CSS) using jquery.
How to detect such action via jquery?
Because right now some elements are not reloaded if I use the back button in a browser. But if I use links in the website everything is refreshed and showed correctly.
IMPORTANT!
Some people have probably misunderstood what I want. I don't want to refresh the current page. I want to refresh the page that is loaded after I press the back button. here is what I mean in a more detailed way:
You can use pageshow event to handle situation when browser navigates to your page through history traversal:
window.addEventListener( "pageshow", function ( event ) {
var historyTraversal = event.persisted ||
( typeof window.performance != "undefined" &&
window.performance.navigation.type === 2 );
if ( historyTraversal ) {
// Handle page restore.
window.location.reload();
}
});
Note that HTTP cache may be involved too. You need to set proper cache related HTTP headers on server to cache only those resources that need to be cached. You can also do forced reload to instuct browser to ignore HTTP cache: window.location.reload( true ). But I don't think that it is best solution.
For more information check:
It's been a while since this was posted but I found a more elegant solution if you are not needing to support old browsers.
You can do a check with
performance.navigation.type
Documentation including browser support is here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Performance/navigation
So to see if the page was loaded from history using back you can do
if(performance.navigation.type == 2){
location.reload(true);
}
The 2 indicates the page was accessed by navigating into the history. Other possibilities are-
0:The page was accessed by following a link, a bookmark, a form submission, or a script, or by typing the URL in the address bar.
1:The page was accessed by clicking the Reload button or via the Location.reload() method.
255: Any other way
These are detailed here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PerformanceNavigation
Note Performance.navigation.type is now deprecated in favour of PerformanceNavigationTiming.type which returns 'navigate' / 'reload' / 'back_forward' / 'prerender': https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PerformanceNavigationTiming/type
Since performance.navigation is now deprecated, you can try this:
var perfEntries = performance.getEntriesByType("navigation");
if (perfEntries[0].type === "back_forward") {
location.reload(true);
}