question

After several hours of debugging an HTML5 app in both FireTV and FireTVStick devices, we figured we'd post what we've leaned here about history handling in the mentioned devices for future reference: It's worth noting that our history handling works seamless across the following platforms: WebOS, SmartTV 2014, Tizen, Android (Cordova + OS Webview), Android (Cordova + Crosswalk Webview)... but when it came to fireTV devices, the navigator never triggered a "popstate" event regardless of how many states were pushed. The history handling (from Amazon's docs and demos) is straight forward: window.addEventListener("load", function () { window.addEventListener("popstate", function () { // do something console.log('popped'); }); }); But no popstate ever gets dispatched events when the back button is pressed. Long story short, after countless hours of debugging, we realized that Amazon's documentation ( https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/platforms/webapps/faq#How%20can%20I%20customize%20the%20Amazon%20Remote%20Back%20button%20behavior%20for%20a%20web%20app%3F) reported that "The Back button does not raise a standard key event". Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. A simple snippet: window.addEventListener("keydown", function (evt) { console.dir(evt) }); proved that not only the following standard key event is raised when the back button is pressed: KeyboardEvent altKey: false bubbles: true cancelBubble: false cancelable: true charCode: 0 keyCode: 27 keyIdentifier: "U+001B" keyLocation: 0 type: "keydown" view: Window which: 27 ... but that it is also a "cancelable" event, and when cancelled ( e.g. event.preventDefault() ), the navigator does not raise the expected "popstate" event. Our application use an abstraction layer that monitors all key events, and dispatches other events (dpadup, etc...) based on which key is pressed. This allows us to achieve portability across platform. The module also happens to be preventing the default on certain keys (enter, tab, esc. etc...). Since user agents default handling vary slightly for these keys,, the application handles them itself uniformly instead. Thus since the fireTV devices trigger a standard cancelable keyboard ESC. event for the back button AND Amazon documentation reports otherwise... we ended up doing several hours of debugging on the Amazon web app tester. I hope this helps.