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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T18:05:44+00:00

I asked about this on the jquery forum a few weeks ago without luck,

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I asked about this on the jquery forum a few weeks ago without luck, so I will try again here 🙂

I’ve made a simple widget for a project I’m working on, but I have encountered an odd problem.

It is easiest to explain it with an example implementation.
http://decko.dk/buttontest

On the page there are 3 button. The first one is my drop down widget. The next one is a regular disabled button (A) and the last one a regular enabled button (B).
If you then refresh the page (press F5 or whatever) the enabled button is mysteriously now disabled.
I have no clue why this happens, but if button A is not disabled to begin with, button B will not be disabled when refreshing. Also, if I remove the call to insertAfter in my widget-code, the button will not be disabled.
Can anyone shed light on why this strange behavior occurs?

By the way, I have only been able to reproduce this in Firefox.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I believe this is a bug in how Firefox remembers form field/control values and states:

    1. After the first page load, there are three <button> elements in the document, and <button id="button_a"> is disabled. (When the jQuery UI styled button is enabled or disabled, it sets the underlying element to the same state.)
    2. Firefox remembers that the second <button> is disabled.
    3. After a page refresh, before any scripts are run, Firefox restores form fields and controls. It disables the second <button>, but since no script has been run, the second button is <button id="button_b">.
    4. When jQuery UI creates the styled button for <button id="button_b">, it sees that it is disabled and continues to style it as disabled.

    There are two issues here:

    1. How Firefox remembers which elements are disabled. It’s not taking into account dynamic elements. I suggest filing a bug with Mozilla for this.
    2. Form elements stay disabled after a page refresh. I’m not sure if this is the correct behaviour, but there are two bugzilla reports on this.

    The test case can simplify down to just adding a <button> element dynamically and disabling <button id="button_a">, no jQuery / jQuery UI necessary:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title>disabled button test</title>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    window.onload = function () {
        var a = document.getElementById('button_a'),
            menu = document.createElement('button');
        menu.appendChild(document.createTextNode('Menu'));
        document.body.insertBefore(menu, a);
        a.disabled = true;
    };
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <button id="button_a">A</button>
    <button id="button_b">B</button>
</body>
</html>
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