localStorage and sessionStorage test true in IE on locally-served pages

[RwwL]

IE8's default settings don't allow the use of cookies or local/session storage on pages served from the hard drive, even after you "Allow Blocked Content" to allow JavaScript execution. So when viewing C:\Documents and Settings\username\filename.html, Modernizr 1.6 will test true for localStorage or sessionStorage, but attempts to get or set storage items will result in "is null or not an object" errors because the window.localStorage/window.sessionStorage will return undefined in this case.

It's pretty easy to work around this:

tests['localstorage'] = function() {
    try {
      return ('localStorage' in window) && window['localStorage'] && window.localStorage !== null;
    } catch(e) {
      return false;
    }
};

tests['sessionstorage'] = function() {
    try {
        return ('sessionStorage' in window) && window['sessionStorage'] && window.sessionStorage !== null;
    } catch(e){
        return false;
    }
};

Kind of an edge case, but I'm currently working on a toolkit of web controls that's specifically intended to be distributed as a ZIP and run locally, and accounting for this offline context was helpful.

[paulirish]

Thx for the suggestion.. we can actually revise this test since it uses a try/catch anyway.. something we should do.
thanks for the help.. we'll incorporate this fact into the inline docs.

[paulirish]

IE8 doesnt support localStorage with local files. new test accounts for this. closed by c0c542d