Prevent onbeforeunload from being called when clicking on mailto link

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1749052

  •  20-09-2019
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Question

Is there anyway to prevent onbeforeunload from being called when clicking on mailto link in chrome. In FF, Safari, IE it is working fine.

<html>
<head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js">
        google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
    </script>

    <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function(){
            window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit;
        });

        function confirmExit() {
            return "Are you sure?";
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <a href="mailto:someone@somewhere.com?subject=test mail&body=Hello%20World">Mail Link</a>
</body>
</html>
Was it helpful?

Solution

What about a workaround?

$(document).ready(function(){
    mailtoClicked = false;
    window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit;
    //Test if browser is Chrome
    if (/chrom(e|ium)/.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase())) {
        $('a[href^=mailto]').click(function() {mailtoClicked = true;});
    }
});

function confirmExit() {
    if (!mailtoClicked) {
        return "Are you sure?";
    } else {
        mailtoClicked = false;
    }
}

Demo.

OTHER TIPS

Here is a proposed solutions that looks reasonable

http://www.ilovebonnie.net/2009/09/23/how-to-use-onbeforeunload-with-form-submit-buttons/

UPDATE (link is dead) - Copied contents from Google Cache

How to Use onbeforeunload with Form Submit Buttons

September 23rd, 2009 — Geekery

While doing some programming I came across an interesting predicament. While I understand it’s evil to make it hard for a user to leave a page, I’m not here to argue the merits (or lack thereof) of onbeforeunload.

On a particular form, we are forcing the browser to not cache the information to avoid potential AJAX/JavaScript problems if they should leave the form and come back as browsers don’t all act the same (eg IE leaves checkboxes checked but doesn’t remember changes that have occurred to the page due to JavaScript). As such, we warn our users when they’re about to leave the order form to let them know they’ll need to fill it in again.

The function was simple enough:

window.onbeforeunload = function () {
    return "You are about to leave this order form. You will lose any information...";
}

Unfortunately, this would also be triggered if the user submitted the form which, is obviously not what we want. After searching around on the Internet I came across a simple solution that I thought I would share:

// Create a variable that can be set upon form submission
var submitFormOkay = false;
window.onbeforeunload = function () {
    if (!submitFormOkay) {
        return "You are about to leave this order form. You will lose any information...";
    }
}

Since onclick appears to register before onsubmit when clicking a submit button, we can add a little variable declaration to our submit button so that submitFormOkay will be set to true before the form submission happens:

<input type="submit" id="submit_button" onclick="submitFormOkay = true;">
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