Is it possible to detect a mouse click on a page on every element?

Question

I want to trigger a function if a user clicks anywhere on the page, even clicking on no element or link. Is it possible?

The extension runs only on youtube.com so I can't add every element on the page to the trigger and I assume that every page has different element's ids.

you can inject the code of the above question in the page so your problem will be solved. — Emmanouil Chountasis, Aug 30 '15 at 08:20
Voting to reopen (..err, magically reopening by dupehammer), as duplicate is incorrect. It deals only with detecting whether a particular click event is a left mouse button (which isn't even asked by the OP!) and does not deal with the core problem of capturing the even anywhere on the page. — Xan, Aug 30 '15 at 10:14

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:29

Emmanouil Chountasis is correct, you can use the code at "Detect left mouse button press" to detect a left mouse click crossbrowser.

To the heart of your question, I think what you're looking for is Event Delegation. In jQuery,

// Select a wrapper for the events
$('body')
  // Whenever any element in the <body> is clicked
  .on('click', '*', function (evt) {
    // Emmanouil Chountasis's suggestion would be called right here
    if (isLeftClick(evt)) { 
      // ... do stuff
    }
  });

See http://learn.jquery.com/events/event-delegation/

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 09 '21 at 09:13

0

Reed's answer works fine, but it triggers the action multiple times. I found this solution that only works on left mouse triggers and executes once per click.

$("body").unbind().click(function() {
    //Do Stuff
});

edited Apr 09 '21 at 09:13

desertnaut

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answered Apr 09 '21 at 09:02

TrainedMusician

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Is it possible to detect a mouse click on a page on every element?

2 Answers2