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
<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 Standard # dom-name-dev |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser