How do I programmatically click on an element in JavaScript?

Question

In IE, I can just call element.click() from JavaScript - how do I accomplish the same task in Firefox? Ideally I'd like to have some JavaScript that would work equally well cross-browser, but if necessary I'll have different per-browser JavaScript for this.

Answer 1

The document.createEvent documentation says that "The createEvent method is deprecated. Use event constructors instead."

So you should use this method instead:

var clickEvent = new MouseEvent("click", {     "view": window,     "bubbles": true,     "cancelable": false }); 

and fire it on an element like this:

element.dispatchEvent(clickEvent); 

as shown here.

Answer 2

For firefox links appear to be "special". The only way I was able to get this working was to use the createEvent described here on MDN and call the initMouseEvent function. Even that didn't work completely, I had to manually tell the browser to open a link...

var theEvent = document.createEvent("MouseEvent"); theEvent.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null); var element = document.getElementById('link'); element.dispatchEvent(theEvent);  while (element) {     if (element.tagName == "A" && element.href != "")     {         if (element.target == "_blank") { window.open(element.href, element.target); }         else { document.location = element.href; }         element = null;     }     else     {         element = element.parentElement;     } }