Difference between window.location and location.href

Solution 1:

window.location is an object that holds all the information about the current document location (host, href, port, protocol etc.).

location.href is shorthand for window.location.href (you call location from global object - window, so this is window.location.href), and this is only a string with the full URL of the current website.

They act the same when you assign a URL to them - they will redirect to the page which you assign, but you can see differences between them when you open the browser console (firebug or developer tools) and write window.location and location.href.

Solution 2:

They are different. window.location is an object containing the property href which is a string.

Setting window.location and window.location.href behave the same way, as you noticed, because it was built into the JavaScript language long ago. Read more in this question about setting window.location.

Getting window.location and window.location.href behave differently because the former is an object and the latter is a string. If you run string functions like indexOf() or toLowerCase(), you have to use window.location.href.

Solution 3:

window.location has other properties aside from href but if you assign window.location a URL it will redirect.

You can see all of its properties in MDN (like search, protocol, hash, ...)