Window: frameElement property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The Window.frameElement property returns the element (such as <iframe> or <object>) in which the window is embedded.

Note: Despite this property's name, it works for documents embedded within any embedding point, including <object>, <iframe>, or <embed>.

Value

The element which the window is embedded into. If the window isn't embedded into another document, or if the document into which it's embedded has a different origin, the value is null instead.

Examples

js
const frameEl = window.frameElement;
// If we're embedded, change the containing element's URL to 'https://mozilla.org/'
if (frameEl) {
  frameEl.src = "https://mozilla.org/";
}

Specifications

Specification
HTML
# dom-frameelement-dev

Browser compatibility

See also

  • window.frames returns an array-like object, listing the direct sub-frames of the current window.
  • window.parent returns the parent window, which is the window containing the frameElement of the child window.