I am interested in making a website that flashes through a visitors entire web history when they visit. I plan on using JavaScript to grab the history on each viewer's computer and animate through it with varying speeds depending on how much they had. My thought was to use history.length to determine the length of the visitor's history, and then use history.go() to navigate -1, -2, -3, etc. through the entire web history. I recognize that load times would be HUGE, but right now I am just trying to think through the concept. This related question seems like what I would use for the basis of my code, however, I don't understand why they describe that this method would not work. I am a student who is very new to JavaScript.
Do you guys have any knowledge of whether or not this will work, or any ideas on ways to achieve my idea?
You can call history.go() once. That's about as far as you'll get. The reason is simple, once you're on the previous page, your javascript is gone. Iframes won't work either due to the fact that you can't execute your own JS in an iframe that has a page from another domain. Read about same origin policy for more info on that.
The only real solution I can think of is a browser extension. The reason that'll work is due to the fact that your JS can persist across multiple sites. You'd probably just need a userscript in each page that does the following:
history.go(-1) after a timeout (to control the speed)I'm most familiar with Chrome so I'm imagining a browserAction to enable/disable the script and a content script that does the redirect. Other potential options include Greasemonkey (Firefox), Tampermonkey (Chrome), Personalized Web (Chrome) scripts