Q:

How can I send an ajax request and redirect to another page

I have seen the following sequence in my client code:
$.ajax({
    url: "...",
    data: {},
    success: function() {
    // I don't care about the response
    }
});

top.location.href="http://...." 

As you can see the browser send an ajax request, and doesn't care about the response. 
after it sends the request the page is redirected to another url using the top.location.href statement .
I am a newbie in javascript and I am not sure if the ajax request is guaranteed to be sent?
Is there another approach to get this send and forget and redirect ajax behavior? 
EDIT:
Just to clarify, I do not want to wait for this ajax to finish it's long operation and put the redirection line in the success callback. 

A:

If you want to be 100% sure that the message was received and processed, you should do your redirect in the success handler. 
This would also enable you to do error handling if that is required - for example, what if you make the AJAX request but it fails for some reason? If you just redirect the user would never know there was a problem. But maybe you do not need to care about this depending upon this specifics of your application.

