Firefox Unexpectedly Trigger Click Events on Right Mouse Click: A Troubleshooting Guide

Firefox Unexpectedly Triggers Right-Click Events Instead of Intended Mouse Click Functions: A Troubleshooting Guide

During my work on implementing the drag and drop/move module for a project, an unexpected bug detected while testing on Firefox.

The issue was related to how the browser handles mouse clicks, particularly the right mouse click triggering an unintended event.

In this post, we’ll dive into the cause of this issue and propose a solution to ensure smooth functionality across all browsers.

The cause of the issue:

By default, all the othe browsers registers contextmenu event on right mouse click, on the other hand firefox behaves differently by registering a click event on the document object when a right mouse click occurs. I’ve attached the cover video to demonstrating this issue.

💡 The Solution

You can check the specific mouse click event via event.button property.

if(event.button === 0) left mouse btn clicked

if(event.button === 1) mouse scroll clicked

if(event.button === 2) right mouse btn clicked

Javascript event to handle left mouse click:

// Left mouse click
window.addEventListener("mousedown", (event) => {
  if (event.buttons === 0) {
    // your code
  }
});

// Mouse scroll click
window.addEventListener("mousedown", (event) => {
  if (event.buttons === 1) {
    // your code
  }
});
// Right mouse click
window.addEventListener("mousedown", (event) => {
  if (event.buttons === 0) {
    // your code
  }
});

Happy coding! 🚀