What's the effect of adding 'return false' to a click event listener?

Question

Many times I\'ve seen links like these in HTML pages:

Click here !

Answer 1

I am surprised that no one mentioned onmousedown instead of onclick. The

onclick='return false'

does not catch the browser's default behaviour resulting in (sometimes unwanted) text selection occurring for mousedown but

onmousedown='return false'

does.

In other words, when I click on a button, its text sometimes becomes accidentally selected changing the look of the button, that may be unwanted. That is the default behaviour that we are trying to prevent here. However, the mousedown event is registered before click, so if you only prevent that behaviour inside your click handler, it will not affect the unwanted selection arising from the mousedown event. So the text still gets selected. However, preventing default for the mousedown event will do the job.

See also event.preventDefault() vs. return false