How to detect left click anywhere on the document using jQuery?

Question

I have this right now:

$(document).click(function(e) { alert('clicked'); });

In Firefox, this event is firing when I left-click OR right-click. I only want it to fire when I left-click.

Does attaching a click handler to the document work differently than attaching it to other elements? For other elements, it only seems to fire on left clicks.

Is there a way to detect only left clicks besides looking at e.button, which is browser-dependent?

Thanks

Answer 1

Try

$(document).click(function(e) { 
    // Check for left button
    if (e.button == 0) {
        alert('clicked'); 
    }
});

However, there seems to be some confusion as to whether IE returns 1 or 0 as left click, you may need to test this :)

Further reading here: jQuery Gotcha

EDIT: missed the bit where you asked not to use e.button. Sorry!

However, the example here returns the same ID regardless of looking at it in FF or IE, and uses e.button. could possibly have updated the jQuery framework? The other answer is that older versions of IE return a different value, which would be a pain. Unfortunately I only have IE 7/8 here to test against.