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HTMLCanvasElement: contextlost event

Baseline: Not widely supported

Baseline is determined by this web feature being supported on the current and the previous major versions of major browsers.

Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.

The contextlost event of the Canvas API is fired if the user agent detects that the backing storage associated with a CanvasRenderingContext2D context is lost. Contexts can be lost for several reasons like driver crashes or the application runs out of memory, etc.

By default the user agent will attempt to restore the context and then fire the contextrestored event. User code can prevent the context from being restored by calling Event.preventDefault() during event handling.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

js

addEventListener("contextlost", (event) => {});

oncontextlost = (event) => {};

Event type

A generic Event.

Example

The code fragment below detects the contextlost event.

js

const canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");

canvas.addEventListener("contextlost", (event) => {
  console.log(event);
});

To prevent the context from being restored the code might instead look like this:

js

const canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");

canvas.addEventListener("contextlost", (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();
});

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
contextlost_event 98 98 No No 84 No 98 98 No 68 No 18.0

See also

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasElement/contextlost_event