How do you change page content and URL without reloading the whole page?
11th February 2012
My answer to How do you change page content and URL without reloading the whole page? on Quora
This can only be done using JavaScript. You use XMLHttpRequest to pull in new information from the server (also known as Ajax—most people use a JavaScript library such as jQuery to handle this) and then use the HTML5 history API, in particular the pushState method, to update the URL.
Sadly pushState isn’t supported by IE versions older than IE10—it’s up to you if you resort to fragment identifier URL hacks to support that browser or (my preferred approach) just leave IE users with full page refreshes. Sadly most versions of the Android browser don’t support pushState either, and performance constraints on mobile means they are harder to ignore than IE.
More recent articles
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025
- The ChatGPT sharing dialog demonstrates how difficult it is to design privacy preferences - 3rd August 2025