Posts Categorized: Browser Struggle

– or: How to persist data in the 21st century.

The common way to persist data on the client side – application state, offline data, whatever –  still is to use cookies. But times have changed, and so have browsers, and there are better ways to do it today.

But why are cookies that bad? Well, here are the top three reasons:

1. Of all client side storage mechanisms, cookies have the worst limitation in size (4k if you want to stay IE-safe)
2. Cookies are sent to the server on every requests that matches the cookie domain – inlcuding XHR calls (aka. How to slow down your AJAX app)
3. Cookies perform bad, can be easily disabled, and, oh well, they are sooo 1995…

What else to use? There are several options, let’s start with the best:
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There is still some traffic coming in from people who are searching for how to deal with the safari popup blocker. So I thought it might be nice to also tell what you can do about it – as most people want solutions, not backgrounds…

So, here you go:

It’s pretty simple, really. What to do? Well, call window.open() while the popup blocker still allows it, and store a reference to the window object. Then, later, do with it what you want. That is, changing the location in most cases.
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Safari console screenshot

Update: If you are interested in how to make window.open work you might want to also read the follow-up: Safari and window.open – How to do it

Working on a project these days, I noticed that the only call to window.open in that app did not work in Safari. Looking into it, I found that it was Safari’s popup blocker that wouldn’t let that call succeed.

Usually, I don’t deal with window.open, so that behaviour was new to me, and I asked Mr. Google what he knew on this. Not much, as it turned out out – I found only two interesting notes on it. One was pretty strange and I guess it was more about a Safari 3 beta not returning a window object. The other one proposed the the window.open call had to be within the same function body as the method handling the event. The comments on that post affirmed this suspicion, but I decided to look into it myself.

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