Event: defaultPrevented property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The defaultPrevented read-only property of the Event interface returns a boolean value indicating whether or not the call to Event.preventDefault() canceled the event.

Value

A boolean value, where true indicates that the default user agent action was prevented, and false indicates that it was not.

Example

This example logs attempts to visit links from two <a> elements. JavaScript is used to prevent the second link from working.

HTML

html
<p><a id="link1" href="#link1">Visit link 1</a></p>
<p><a id="link2" href="#link2">Try to visit link 2</a> (you can't)</p>
<p id="log"></p>

JavaScript

js
function stopLink(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
}

function logClick(event) {
  const log = document.getElementById("log");

  if (event.target.tagName === "A") {
    log.innerText = event.defaultPrevented
      ? `Sorry, but you cannot visit this link!\n${log.innerText}`
      : `Visiting link…\n${log.innerText}`;
  }
}

const a = document.getElementById("link2");
a.addEventListener("click", stopLink);
document.addEventListener("click", logClick);

Result

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-event-defaultprevented①

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobileserver
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Deno
Node.js
defaultPrevented

Legend

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Full support
Full support