Downsides of onMousedown vs. onClick?

javascript onclick dom-events onmousedown
Jack7890 picture Jack7890 · Oct 28, 2009 · Viewed 17.6k times · Source

I've been dealing with a bane-of-my-existence Javascript problem involving tracking when a user clicks on a link (in case you're curious, here it is: Why does using target="_blank" cause Javascript to fail?).

I've figured out that I can solve the problem by tracking an onMousedown event rather than an onClick event.

I'm curious about the downsides of this approach. The ones I can think of:

  1. If a user clicked down on a link and then moved the mouse off the link before releasing it, then the event would be recorded even though the user hadn't visited the link
  2. If a user used the tab key to move the browser focus to the link and then hit enter, the click would not be recorded

Neither of these are common, so I'm not terribly worried about them.

Are there any other downsides I'm missing?

Answer

Raze picture Raze · Oct 28, 2009

One more: mousedown captures right / middle clicks too.

But for your two reasons, I would stick to onclick. I know quite a few people who use keyboard nav. Especially search-and-gotolink in FF.(/ to search followed by enter to go to the link).

But if these two are not a problem for you, I think right / middle clicks wouldn't be too.

I think the way to track all the users who follow the link is quite tricky -- the user could right click and click on new tab / new window...

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