# Exploring the Page Visibility API for Detecting Page Background State

DevFeed: [Exploring the Page Visibility API for Detecting Page Background State](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/exploring-the-page-visibility-api-for-detecting-page-background-state-28002.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://tech.trivago.com/post/2020-11-17-exploringthepagevisibilityapifordetectin/>)

Author: Peter Perlepes Software Engineer

Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Trivago](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/trivago.md>)

Topics: [Web platform](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/web-platform.md>), [API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/api.md>), [browser](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/browser.md>), [Mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mobile.md>), [Caching](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/caching.md>)

Tags: [api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/api.md>), [browser](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/browser.md>), [frontend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/frontend.md>), [mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mobile.md>), [navigation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/navigation.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [web-platform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/web-platform.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines the Page Visibility API as a way to detect when a web page enters a background state. It explains why beforeunload and unload handlers are unreliable on mobile devices and can prevent the back/forward cache, reducing navigation performance.

## Source excerpt

At trivago we are working heavily on the web platform and, based on the scale that we need to serve our users, our applications need to cater for many different kinds of environments and conditi...