Is it possible to get mouse buttons 4, 5, etc?

Question

Simply put, is there any way to detect additional mouse button presses in JavaScript? It's not documented with the rest of the mouse input, so I guess it's not in standard implementation.

Is there any way, such as a library, which can enable extra mouse buttons?

Answer 1

Yes you could do this, check MouseEvent.button, see example below that will detect 3 and 4 buttons click.

Some pointing devices provide or simulate more buttons. To represent such buttons, the value must be doubled for each successive button (in the binary series 8, 16, 32, ... ) as mentioned in https://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#events-mouseevents

var whichButton = function (e) {
    // Handle different event models
    var e = e || window.event;
    var btnCode;

    if ('object' === typeof e) {
        btnCode = e.button;

        switch (btnCode) {
            case 3:
                console.log('Browser Back button clicked.');
            break;

            case 4:
                console.log('Browser Forward button clicked.');
            break;

            default:
                console.log('Unexpected code: ' + btnCode);
        }
    }
}

<button onmouseup="whichButton(event);" oncontextmenu="event.preventDefault();">Click with mouse...</button>