window.opener is not right

I'm opening a popup and want to have a click action in it cause the execution of some jQuery in the page that opened it. Everything I 开发者_开发技巧find online says I should be able to do that with window.opener, (e.g. JQuery - Write to opener window)

But when I console.log window.opener, it's just 'true', not a real object. window.opener.jQuery is undefined as is window.opener.$ and 'window.opener.document'.

Here's the window open code:

window.open('http://google.com' , "moderatorWindow", 'width=300, height=300');

This is in Safari. Other pages are able to launch a popup and when I inspect window.opener on those, I get a real object. What am I doing wrong?

Your variable is true and not an object because of same-domain policy rules. Just like an iframe, if the popup you open is not on the same domain or sub-domain then it is lost to you after you create it. The web would be a very unsecure place if I could say, open a (hidden) iframe on my site to gmail.com and was able to read your email.

Even if the popup is on a sub-domain you have to do extra work and set the document.domain value of both windows to the root domain (eg. mydomain.com). This is to ensure that the popped-up site wants to be known to its parent (again, think security, if my coke.ning.com community could open a hidden iframe to your pepsi.ning.com and do brute force attempts at a login, etc.)

To prove my point try actually going to google.com and opening up Firebug (or Inspector if you're using Safari or Chrome) and doing:

var bob = window.open('http://google.com' , "moderatorWindow", 'width=300, height=300');
bob.window.location.href; // returns "http://www.google.com/"

Lastly, feel free to call jQuery on the child page to modify elements on the same page and vice-versa but you can't use jQuery from one page to modify the dom of the other page. I tried this a few years ago to try to save on some loading time and, unless something has changed, it doesn't work. jQuery seems to be bound to the window object of where it was created. Weird things happen.

Presumably you are calling:

console.log(window.opener);

which should call the toString() method of whatever window.opener references. It should reference a window object, which is a host object. Per the ECMA-262, a host object's toString() method (if it has one) can return anthing it likes, even throw an error (try it on certain IE host objects implemented using ActiveX).

This article might help: http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/SafariJSProgTopics/Articles/Cross-documentmessaging.html