After browsing through the issues going aroung the browser back/forward button, I was not able to find a working solution for browser back/forward button implementation using icefaces with RSH. I think it will be more appropriate to provide a working solution along with the procedure to implement RSH with icefaces, it would be great.

Implemented navigation notifier component. The component is using RSH library to detected forward or back navigation. When the navigation detected the component will execute a postback that invoke the bean method registered with the 'action' binding of the navigationComponent.

Added also 'navigationNotifier' test case under icefaces/samples/core/test directory.

Added Wiki documentation: http://wiki.icesoft.org/display/ICE/navigationNotifier .

Tested navigationNotifier in the new test application using ICEfaces3 trunk rev. 28992, and found the following issues:

Firefox 12: 'Navigation detected!' message does not render when using 'back' browser navigation button.

Chrome 18: 'Navigation detected!' message does not render when using any of the 'back' or 'forward' browser navigation buttons.
When clicking the 'forward' browser button, a JS error is seen in console:
[window] Error [status: malformedXML code: 200]: During update: vhz3as16-retrieve-update not found bridge.js.jsf;jsessionid=1588CA07FE5ABB81FC876205FE783B0A:1249

IE8/7/9: 'Navigation detected!' message does not render when using any of the 'back' or 'forward' browser navigation buttons.
When clicking the 'forward' browser button, a JS error message pops up:

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MDDS; .NET4.0C)
Timestamp: Thu, 10 May 2012 18:09:53 UTC

Message: 'id' is null or not an object
Line: 1137
Char: 5
Code: 0
URI: http://localhost:8080/navigationNotifier/javax.faces.resource/bridge.js.jsf;jsessionid=755F0097E2AC02F31C358C0F22A99972?v=1086865489

Committed fix for IE browser, the identifier(element) function which returns the ID of the passed in element will now behave in IE the same way as in the other browsers. Previously it was throwing an exception if the argument is null.

Re-tested with ICEfaces3 trunk rev. 28998:
IE JS errors have been resolved.
For Firefox and Chrome, I probably misunderstood the way it should work, expecting to have the 'Navigation detected' message rendered on the page once when clicking the back button, and then again when clicking on the 'forward' button in the browser.

For Firefox and Chrome, only the first time when the browser cache is cleared, there is still an error seen in the error console, when clicking on the 'forward' button in the browser.

The message in Firefox 12 is:
Timestamp: 10/05/2012 5:06:29 PM
Error: attempt to run compile-and-go script on a cleared scope
Source File: http://localhost:8080/navigationNotifier/javax.faces.resource/jsf.js.jsf;jsessionid=451B48F2469AFCFF7B13579D219E212D?ln=javax.faces&stage=Development&v=1700203556
Line: 2076

Are you always seeing the error? I do se this error from time to time in other use cases. I think this is Firefox+Firebug error, most probably it does not occur wen Firebug is disabled. There's also this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635548 .

The error occurs when the browser doesn't use the session tracking cookie (as mentioned already). Also RSH library uses document.write function to insert an element into the document, when the browser doesn't have a session setup yet FF will throw the mentioned error.

Attached patch that replaces the 'document.write' element inserting done by RSH with the component rendering the elements instead. This gets rid of the JS error but the RSH won't be able to detect the browser navigation until the cookie based session is not established.

The FF limitation will be documented as a Known Issue.

Applied attached patched.