Window: name property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The Window.name property gets/sets the name of the window's browsing context.

Value

A string.

Description

The name of the window is used primarily for setting targets for hyperlinks and forms. Browsing contexts do not need to have names.

Modern browsers will reset Window.name to an empty string if a tab loads a page from a different domain, and restore the name if the original page is reloaded (e.g. by selecting the "back" button). This prevents an untrusted page from accessing any information that the previous page might have stored in the property (potentially the new page might also modify such data, which might then be read by the original page if it was reloaded).

Window.name has also been used in some frameworks for providing cross-domain messaging as a more secure alternative to JSONP. Modern web applications hosting sensitive data should, however, not rely on window.name for cross-domain messaging — that is not its intended purpose and there are safer/better ways of sharing information between windows. Window.postMessage() is the recommended mechanism.

Note: window.name converts all stored values to their string representations using the toString method.

Examples

html
<script>
  // Open a tab with a specific browsing context name
  const otherTab = window.open("url1", "_blank");
  if (otherTab) otherTab.name = "other-tab";
</script>
<a href="url2" target="other-tab">This link will be opened in the other tab.</a>

Specifications

Specification
HTML
# dom-name-dev

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobileserver
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Deno
name

Legend

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Full support
Full support
See implementation notes.