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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T06:15:23+00:00

Internet Explorer behaves differently from Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari. See my question: HTML link

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Internet Explorer behaves differently from Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari. See my question:
HTML link with padding and CSS style active does not work

Is this undefined behavior? Or I need to report a bug. If later, then which of browsers are doing right?

Here is a test code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
    <head>
        <title>css active padding href problem</title>
        <style type="text/css">
            a{
                background:#CCC;
                border:1px solid #666;
                padding:0 35px 0 0;
            }
            a:active{
                padding:0 0 0 35px;
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div>
            <p>Click on <i>Stack</i> - href does not work.
               Click on <i>Overflow</i> - href works.
               All browsers are affected.
               Except IE.</p>
            <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">StackOverflow</a>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think IE is doing wrong. a:active is working when the mousebutton is down, but the href doesn’t go off before the mousebutton is up again.

    Pseudo-code:

    onmousedown(e) {
  setCssAsActive();
}
onmouseup(e) {
  activateHref();
}

    If the mouse goes up outside of the element, nothing happends. Try to click on a link, then drag your mouse away from the link and then release the button. Nothing should happend.

    That is what happening in your code. When you are clicking at the Stack-text, the link moves away fron your pointer, and when you release the button, the link is no longer under the pointer. It moves back at the release-time, but then it is too late.

    Therefore, I think IE is doing wrong.

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