I was doing some research around April of 2009 on JavaScript interaction between web browser windows. I was doing this because web browsers are starting to split off each tab/window into separate processes/threads (Firefox is lagging in this), which can lead to some useful new implementations in the browser world, including multithreading. I wanted to explore the interaction between these windows to make sure there were no caveats that might creep up if I decided to take advantage of this.
The first one I found was that each browser window has its own instance of all of the base object classes, so prototypes do not carry over, and instanceof will not work as expected.
For example, if in WindowOne, you add a prototype to the Array class called IsArray, it is only accessible by arrays created in WindowOne. If you pass an array created in WindowOne into a second window, the prototype is still available on that one array (IIRC this was not true of some of the browsers at the time, but I tested again today, and it worked for IE8, Firefox3, and Google Chrome). Also, since the base object class in Window1 and other windows are not the same, an object created in Window1 and passed to another window will return false in a instanceof Object operation in that other window.
Here is some example code to help show what I’m talking about.
LocalWindow.html [run this one]
<html><body>
<input type=button onclick="RunTest();" value='Click me when the second window has opened to run the test'>
<script type="text/javascript">
Array.prototype.IsArray=true;
var NewWindow=window.open('RemoteWindow.html'); //Spawn the second window
function RunTest() { NewWindow.RunTest({}, [], new ExampleObject()); }; //Send the test data to remote window
function ExampleObject() { } //An example class
</script></body></html>
RemoteWindow.html [do not run this one, it is opened as a popup from LocalWindow.html]
<html><body><script type="text/javascript">
function RunTest(AnObject, AnArray, AnExampleObject)
{
var MyTests=[
'AnObject instanceof Object',
'AnObject.IsArray', //Object.prototype does not have this (Array.prototype does)
'AnArray instanceof Object',
'AnArray instanceof Array',
'AnArray.IsArray', //This was added to the Array.prototype in the parent window
'AnArray instanceof opener.Array', //This example does not work in IE7 because opener.x cannot be properly accessed
'AnExampleObject instanceof opener.ExampleObject',//This example does not work in IE7 because opener.x cannot be properly accessed
'AnExampleObject instanceof ExampleObject' //This test should error because "ExampleObject" does not exist in this window
];
for(var i=0;i<MyTests.length;i++) //This runs each test like the following: alert("TEST: "+(TEST));
try {
eval('alert("'+MyTests[i]+': "+('+MyTests[i]+'));');
} catch(e) {
alert('Error on test "'+MyTests[i]+'": '+(e.hasOwnProperty('message') ? e.message : e.toString()));
}
}
</script></body></html>
