Question

I have a href from which I am giving out a popup, and I want to activate this in my body’s onload. I use document.getElementbyId("myelement").click() which works fine in IE but Firefox doesn’t support it. I know that .click() will not be supported by Firefox , but I don’t have any other way to do it.

Can you please suggest a workaround that works in IE as well as in Firefox?

Answer 1

You can do as Alsciende suggests, or if you need the event object you can use dispatchEvent to trigger an event handler:

document.body.onload = function () {
    var element = document.getElementById("element");

    if ("click" in element)
        element.click();
    else if ("dispatchEvent" in element) {
        var evt = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
        evt.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window,
            0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null);
        element.dispatchEvent(evt);
    }
}

It’s sometimes useful to use a framework, such as jQuery, to handle these sorts of browser inconsistencies for you. More or less, the same code in jQuery would be:

$('#element').click();