NavigateEvent: navigationType property

Baseline 2026

Newly available

Since January 2026, this feature works across the latest devices and browser versions. This feature might not work in older devices or browsers.

The navigationType read-only property of the NavigateEvent interface returns the type of the navigation — push, reload, replace, or traverse.

Value

An enumerated value representing the type of navigation.

The possible values are:

push: A new location is navigated to, causing a new entry to be pushed onto the history list.
reload: The Navigation.currentEntry is reloaded.
replace: The Navigation.currentEntry is replaced with a new history entry. This new entry will reuse the same key, but be assigned a different id.
traverse: The browser navigates from one existing history entry to another existing history entry.

Examples

Async transitions with special back/forward handling

Sometimes it's desirable to handle back/forward navigations specially, e.g., reusing cached views by transitioning them onto the screen. This can be done by branching as follows:

navigation.addEventListener("navigate", (event) => {
  // Some navigations, e.g. cross-origin navigations, we
  // cannot intercept. Let the browser handle those normally.
  if (!event.canIntercept) {
    return;
  }

  // Don't intercept fragment navigations or downloads.
  if (event.hashChange || event.downloadRequest !== null) {
    return;
  }

  event.intercept({
    async handler() {
      if (myFramework.currentPage) {
        await myFramework.currentPage.transitionOut();
      }

      let { key } = event.destination;

      if (
        event.navigationType === "traverse" &&
        myFramework.previousPages.has(key)
      ) {
        await myFramework.previousPages.get(key).transitionIn();
      } else {
        // This will probably result in myFramework storing
        // the rendered page in myFramework.previousPages.
        await myFramework.renderPage(event.destination);
      }
    },
  });
});