# Browser's back button event

**URL:** https://forum.kirupa.com/t/browsers-back-button-event/306370
**Category:** Uncategorized
**Created:** [March 14, 2010, 8:44am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/browsers-back-button-event/306370 "2010-03-14T08:44:08Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![NeoDreamer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ccd318/32.png) [@NeoDreamer](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/NeoDreamer)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2010, 8:44am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/browsers-back-button-event/306370/1 "2010-03-14T08:44:08Z")

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I’m programming an Ajax-heavy site like Gmail. Everytime someone goes to a new section, I’ll update the address bar. An example use case is:

[site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#comments/page1](http://site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#comments/page1)  
[site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#comments/page2](http://site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#comments/page2)  
[site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#comments/page3](http://site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#comments/page3)  
[site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#tutorials/page1](http://site.com/allWithinThisPage.php#tutorials/page1)  
…

If someone were to use their browser’s back or forward button, I will see the address bar updating correctly, but nothing will happen because I am not listening on that event. I’ve read that I can just periodically poll _window.status_ to see if it has changed, but I’d like to hear if you have any alternative event driven approaches. My site already requires the user to run a processor intensive video transcoding plugin and I don’t want to add on extra processing by running a poller.