Error with HTML/iframe in FireFox - Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIDOMHistory.pushState]

Question

I am creating a small javascript simulation of a java-based (JSF) server. The bootstrap javascript file will download and parse a bunch of files using AJAX, and then generate a large HTML string. This HTML string is a full HTML document - it has a doctype, head, script includes, inline scripts, body, etc.

The reason I do not want to use the real JSF back-end is because I would like to be able to have a pure UI environment to test my code without any java/oracle server slowing me down.

I want to share my code (in a .zip file for example) with anyone and they should be able to open the page (with a small loading screen while the AJAX calls are made) in any browser without some server already installed on their machine.

The answer to that question led me to explore more - now I've run into a different error but I cannot seem to explain it.

Fiddle #1 : This one attempts to put the HTML into an iframe using the iframe's document.write. In this HTML there is a script that pushes a new history state history.pushState(null, null, hash)

Fiddle #2 : This one attempts to put the HTML into the iframe, but this time it just uses location.hash = hash

Both fiddles seem to work fine in Chrome and Safari and IE 9 - but Firefox gives the following error:

NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIDOMHistory.pushState]

I don't understand this error - if you do this same code history.pushState(null,null,"#test") on any page in firefox using the javascript console in FireBug it works fine - but in this particular situation it doesn't work.

I also tried to perform document.open(); document.write(html); document.close() on the document in the current page (instead of creating an iframe), but the same problem happened - only this time if I put break points in firebug into javascript code inserted in the HTML fragment, the breakpoints don't work which would mean I could no longer debug anything in firefox. At least with the iframe approach, the breakpoints work.

Can anyone shed some light into this problem?

Here is another related question that I asked yesterday which lead to finding this error: Firefox Fail - After using document.write and update to location.hash causes page refresh

wenhuajian wenhuajian · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-07T11:28:09

You can put this code

history.pushState(null,null,"#test")

before

document.open(); 
document.write(html); 
document.close();

Error with HTML/iframe in FireFox - Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIDOMHistory.pushState]

2 Answers