Internet Explorer infinite digest with location change

[thetrevdev]

Bug

Current behavior

http://plnkr.co/edit/7SldRRsrYFO32hiG9abV?p=preview
Infinite digest error in Internet Explorer console after button click
[$rootScope:infdig] 10 $digest() iterations reached. Aborting!
Watchers fired in the last 5 iterations: []

Expected behavior

Location changes without error

Minimal reproduction of the problem with instructions
http://plnkr.co/edit/7SldRRsrYFO32hiG9abV?p=preview with Internet Explorer
Check error console after button click.
Note: this happens when the location change occurs during an $evalAsync

What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior?
We have a large app with different redirect scenarios that may or may not be local to our app. We wish to set location.href.

• Angular version: 1.5/1.6

• Browser: [ IE 11 ]

In internet explorer the hashchange event fires asynchronously. this causes the $locationWatch to think that the $location url was updated as it doesn't match $browser url. It seems like the location logic should know whether a url change occured via $location setters

**Relevant Code:
https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/src/ng/location.js#L970

[gkalpak]

In internet explorer the hashchange event fires asynchronously.

Actually, this has nothing to do with the hashchange event being fired asynchronously (the same happens in Chrome as well). The problem is that in IE11 there is no popstate event fired when only the hash changes, which is fired (synchronously) in other browsers. This is a known bug in IE11 and there is no intention to fix it 😞

[Narretz]

@thetrevdev Do you have a workaround for this? It looks like it's difficult to fix at this point.

[gkalpak]

It seems like the location logic should know whether a url change occured via $location setters

This sounds reasonable. Based on that, I have a potential fix here. (I still need to add tests, but it didn't break any of the existing tests, which is a good sign 😃)
Here is the updated plnkr with the fix.