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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T07:58:45+00:00

I use the following code in one of my html pages. When user clicks

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I use the following code in one of my html pages.
When user clicks "Search Engines" links it opens yahoo.com on a new page and Google on current page.

I’ve tested this and it works (opens both urls), but is there any chance that the page will complete the window.location (redirect to a different page) without completing the href command?

Is there a rule for Precedence between the two command?

**Note: I know I can solve the problem in different ways, but I’m curious about this specific situation.

<html>
<head>
    <title></title>

<script type="text/javascript">
    function clickRedirect() {
        window.location = 'http://www.google.com';
    }
</script>
<body>

<a onmousedown="clickRedirect()" href="http://www.yahoo.com" target="_blank">Search Engines</a>
</body>
</html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The mousedown event will happen first, but as you can see from the fact your code is currently working, that’s not the whole story.

    The question is: Once the mousedown has happened and you’ve set window.location, does the page get whisked away immediately (and therefore processing of the default action of the click on the a element doesn’t happen), or does that default action get completed before the page is destroyed and replaced with the new page?

    The answer is: I don’t think that’s guaranteed behavior at all (either way), and I wouldn’t rely on it cross-browser. For one thing, what if the user holds down the mouse button? Since the default action of an a element isn’t triggered until a click, which requires a mouseup.

    Instead, I’d probably hedge my bets, in two ways:

    First, I’d use click, not mousedown, for this. Users don’t expect pages to swap out when they just hold the mouse down.

    Second, I’d change your function:

    function clickRedirect() {
    setTimeout(function() {
        window.location = "http://www.google.com";
    }, 0);
}

    Now you’re specifically giving the browser a chance to complete the default action of the click before you go off to another page.

    You might find more information on this buried deep in the DOM events specifications:

    …in that they might say something about what should happen when an event is in progress and the page is being destroyed. I didn’t immediately see anything.

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