how to detect if a link was clicked when [removed] is triggered?

Question

I have window.onbeforeunload triggering properly. It\'s displaying a confirmation box to ensure the user knows they are navigating (closing) the window and that any unsaved

Answer 1

You're looking for deferred event handling. I'll explain using jQuery, as it is less code:

window._link_was_clicked = false;
window.onbeforeunload = function(event) {
  if (window._link_was_clicked) {
    return; // abort beforeunload
  }
  // your event handling
};

jQuery(document).on('click', 'a', function(event) {
  window._link_was_clicked = true;
});

a (very) poor man's implementation without jQuery's convenient delegation handling could look like:

document.addEventListener("click", function(event) {
  if (this.nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'a') {
    window._link_was_clicked = true;
  }
}, true);

this allows all links on your page to leave without invoking the beforeunload handler. I'm sure you can figure out how to customize this, should you only want to allow this for a specific set of links (your question wasn't particularly clear on that).