[buu700]

Honestly, the href thing feels like a totally reasonable assumption to me. I think the API design is unfortunate, but given that the API is designed as it is, it stands to reason that the script would also halt execution upon hitting that line.

For me, that's exactly the kind of thing that I tend to be paranoid about and handle defensively by default. I couldn't have confidently told you before today what the precise behavior of setting location.href was without looking it up, but I can see that code I wrote years ago handled it correctly regardless, because it cost me nothing at the time to proactively throw in a return statement.

As in this example, defensiveness can often prevent frustrating heisenbugs. (Not just from false assumptions, but also due to correct assumptions that are later invalidated by third-party changes.) Even when technically unnecessary, it can still be a valid stylistic choice that improves readability by reducing ambiguity.

[phatskat]

> because it cost me nothing at the time to proactively throw in a return statement

This is how I’ve generally always handled redirects, be it server or client - if I’m redirecting the user somewhere else, my expectation is that nothing else on this page or in this script _should_ run. Will it? Maybe, JavaScript is weird. To avoid the possibility, I’m going to return instead of just hoping that my expectations are met.