Can I cancel location.href in Javascript

dom-events, javascript

Solution

Yes you can. You can use the `beforeunload` event to display an alert that the user can confirm or cancel. When the user cancels it, the page navigation is canceled.

Example:

window.addEventListener('beforeunload', (event) => {
  // Cancel the event as stated by the standard.
  event.preventDefault();
  // Chrome requires returnValue to be set.
  event.returnValue = '';
});

Note that not all browsers implement this the same way, and Chrome requires you to set the `returnValue` property on the event to trigger the alert even though the HTML spec says that you should call `event.preventDefault()` to trigger it.

Problem

It might sound silly, but I need this functionality. Can I somehow cancel location.href = 'url' in Javascript once it is executed? For example on click of button I am changing current page with some resource intensive page, I want to give an option to user so that one can cancel it if next page is going to take long time to load.

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