window.open target _self v window.location.href?

Solution 1:

Definitely the second method is preferred because you don't have the overhead of another function invocation:

window.location.href = "webpage.htm";

Solution 2:

Hopefully someone else is saved by reading this.

We encountered an issue with webkit based browsers doing:

window.open("webpage.htm", "_self");

The browser would lockup and die if we had too many DOM nodes. When we switched our code to following the accepted answer of:

location.href = "webpage.html";

all was good. It took us awhile to figure out what was causing the issue, since it wasn't obvious what made our page periodically fail to load.

Solution 3:

As others have said, the second approach is usually preferred.

The two code snippets are not exactly equivalent however: the first one actually sets window.opener to the window object itself, whereas the second will leave it as it is, at least under Firefox.