Take User Back to Where They Scrolled to on previo

Question

Is it possible to take a user back to the area of a page where they scrolled down to when pressing the back button in a browser? As in --- pageA is double your screen size (hence you have to scroll to read more). You click a link on pageA to go to a new page - pageB. After reading you click back in browser. Now when you return to pageA you are back at the top and have to scroll down to where you were to continue reading the rest of the page.

Is there a Jquery or JS way to return to that point in the page. Maybe something with .scrollTop()?

Answer 1

You can use the following code to detect the scroll position.

 $(window).scroll(function (event){
    var scroll = $(window).scrollTop();
    // Do something
 });

Then store scroll in a session and when you click back do scrollTop(scroll) .

Answer 2

If the content is loaded after page "load" event firing, then the back button would not take you back to the position you were. Because the browser scrolls before the 'load' event.

To make the browser remember the scroll position in this case, you have to store the scroll position and status (what content have been loaded) somewhere before navigating away. Either in the cookie, or in the url hash.

If pageA is just a static page without dynamic content (loaded after 'load' event, the browser should remember the scroll position when you go back.

For dynamic content, there at least includes two parts. One is recovering the page status when click "Back" button, so all the dynamic content is loaded, some expander are expanded or collapsed. The other is scroll to there.

The first part depends on how the page is implemented. The 2nd part you can put the scroll top into the cookie when page doing onUnload. For example

$(window).unload(function() {$.cookie('scrollTop',$(window).scrollTop());});

Answer 3

You can do this by using session storage.

$(window).scroll(function () {
  //set scroll position in session storage
  sessionStorage.scrollPos = $(window).scrollTop();
});
var init = function () {
   //return scroll position in session storage
   $(window).scrollTop(sessionStorage.scrollPos || 0)
};
window.onload = init;