Is it possible to load javascript files without executing them

Question

Is it possible to load a javascript file in a browser (e.g. from some javascript code) without the loaded code being executed?

The goal would be to just download the javascript file to ensure that the browser's cache has the current version of a javascript file.

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(Here's a little more background about where the question comes from)

We have a web application which contains lots of javascript files, which are included on different pages of the application. After a new version of the web application is deployed we sometimes have the problem that some user's browser uses old versions of the javascript files (from the browsers cache).

I was thinking about some ways to solve this problem, and one idea was the following:

• on the login page, we can detect when a user uses the current version of the app for the first time
• if that is the case, load a page in a hidden iframe, which (pre-)loads all javascript files with a unique query-string parameter (e.g. <script scr="file1.js?v=123" ...>), to ensure that the browser's cache contains the current version of each file

One possible problem of that approach would be javascript errors due to the js-files being executed after they are loaded. That's what lead to this question.

Answer 1

This can load scripts into new elements that are not part of your HTML.

var scripts = ['script1.js', 'script2.js', ...];

for (var i in scripts) {
  var s = document.createElement('script');
  s.src = scripts[i];
}

Answer 2

You can put the script in a function, that you can call later when needed.