javascript location.hash refreshing in IE

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This appears to be a bug with Internet Explorer (tested with 7 and 8).

Changing window.location.hash should not result in a reload, and it is a common JavaScript technique to use the hash for maintaining state.

If you manually load a page and change the hash using JavaScript it will work.

The problem is when you are redirected to the page from a different location (ie: using HTTP header “Location”), then modifying the hash will result in a reload.

To get around this bug you could:

1) If you can control the redirect, you could replace the Location header with some HTML.

<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=__REDIRECT_LOCATION__">
    <script>window.location = "__REDIRECT_LOCATION__";</script>
</head>
</html>

2) if not, you could try reloading the page when it is loaded. To prevent a reload loop you may need to set a cookie.

window.location = window.location; // window.location.reload() didn't work.

In pseudo code: 

// if is Internet Explorer
//      if ( cookie "reloadPerformed" is not set )
//          set cookie "reloadPerformed" = "1"
//          reload page
//      else 
//          clear cookie "reloadPerformed"

The obviously drawback is that loading the page results in two page request & render, so you’ll would want the reload to be one of the first things the page does when it loads.

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