jQuery click vs onClick

Question

I have a huge jQuery application  and I m using the below two methods for click events   First method  HTML   lt div id  myDiv  gt Some Content lt  div gt    jQuery      myDiv   click function          Some code       Second method  HTML   lt div id  myDiv  onClick  divFunction    gt Some Content lt  div gt    JavaScript function call  function divFunction          Some code     I use either the first or second method in my application  Which one is better  Better for performance  And standard

User · Answer

The first method is to prefer  It uses the advanced event registration model s   which means you can attach multiple handlers to the same element  You can easily access the event object  and the handler can live in any function s scope  Also  it is dynamic  i e it can be invoked at any time and is especially well-suited for dynamically generated elements  Whether you use jQuery  an other library or the native methods directly does not really matter   The second method  using inline attributes  needs a lot of global functions  which leads to namespace pollution  and mixes the content structure  HTML  with the behavior  JavaScript   Do not use that   Your question about performance or standards can t be easily answered  The two methods are just completely different  and do different things  The first one is mightier  while the second one is despised  considered bad style

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From what I understand  your question is not really about whether to use jQuery or not  It s rather  Is it better to bind events inline in HTML or through event listeners   Inline binding is deprecated  Moreover this way you can only bind one function to a certain event   Therefore I recommend using event listeners  This way  you ll be able to bind many functions to a single event and to unbind them later if needed  Consider this pure JavaScript code   querySelector   myDiv   addEventListener  click   function             Some code          This works in most modern browsers   However  if you already include jQuery in your project     just use jQuery   on or  click function

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Using     myDiv   click function    is better as it follows standard event registration model   jQuery internally uses addEventListener and attachEvent     Basically registering an event in modern way is the unobtrusive way of handling events  Also to register more than one event listener for the target you can call addEventListener   for the same target    var myEl   document getElementById  myelement     myEl addEventListener  click   function         alert  Hello world       false    myEl addEventListener  click   function         alert  Hello world again          false     http   jsfiddle net aj55x 1       Why use addEventListener   From MDN       addEventListener is the way to register an event listener as specified   in W3C DOM  Its benefits are as follows          It allows adding more than a single handler for an event  This is particularly useful for DHTML libraries or Mozilla extensions that   need to work well even if other libraries extensions are used    It gives you finer-grained control of the phase when the listener gets activated  capturing vs  bubbling    It works on any DOM element  not just HTML elements       More about Modern event registration -  http   www quirksmode org js events advanced html  Other methods such as setting the HTML attributes  example     lt button onclick  alert  Hello world     gt    Or DOM element properties  example    myEl onclick   function event  alert  Hello world         are old and they can be over written easily    HTML attribute should be avoided as It makes the markup bigger and less readable  Concerns of content structure and behavior are not well-separated  making a bug harder to find   The problem with the DOM element properties method is that only one event handler can be bound to an element per event   More about Traditional event handling -  http   www quirksmode org js events tradmod html  MDN Reference  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs DOM event

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myDiv   click is better  because it separates JavaScript code from HTML  One must try to keep the page behaviour and structure different  This helps a lot

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Onclick Function Jquery      selector   click function      Your Functionality

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Difference in works  If you use click    you can add several functions  but if you use an attribute  only one function will be executed - the last one   DEMO  HTML   lt span id  JQueryClick  gt Click  JQuery lt  span gt   lt  br gt   lt span id  JQueryAttrClick  gt Click  Attr lt  span gt   lt  br gt    JavaScript      JQueryClick   click function   alert  1         JQueryClick   click function   alert  2          JQueryAttrClick   attr  onClick    alert  1        This doesn t work     JQueryAttrClick   attr  onClick    alert  2        If we are talking about performance  in any case directly using is always faster  but using of an attribute  you will be able to assign only one function

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For better performance  use the native JavaScript  For faster development  use jQuery  Check the comparison in performance at jQuery vs Native Element Performance   I ve done a test in Firefox 16 0 32-bit on Windows Server 2008 R2   7 64-bit     span       6 604 operations per second document getElementsByTagName  span       10 331 708 operations sec   For click events  check Native Browser events vs jquery trigger or jQuery vs Native Click Event Binding   Testing in Chrome 22 0 1229 79 32-bit on Windows Server 2008 R2   7 64-bit      jquery a   click window testClickListener      2 957 operations second     forEach call  document querySelectorAll   native a    function el        el addEventListener  click   window testClickListener  false          18 196 operations second

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Go for this as it will give you both standard and performance        myDiv   click function            Some code        As the second method is simple JavaScript code and is faster than jQuery  But here performance will be approximately the same

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The first method of using onclick is not jQuery but simply Javascript  so you do not get the overhead of jQuery  The jQuery way can expanded via selectors if you needed to add it to other elements without adding the event handler to each element  but as you have it now it is just a question if you need to use jQuery or not   Personally since you are using jQuery I would stick with it as it is consistent and does decouple the markup from the script

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Most of the time  native JavaScript methods are a better choice over jQuery when performance is the only criteria  but jQuery makes use of JavaScript and makes the development easy  You can use jQuery as it does not degrade performance too much  In your specific case  the difference of performance is ignorable

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Seperation of concerns is key here  and so the event binding is the generally accepted method  This is basically what a lot of the existing answers have said    However don t throw away the idea of declarative markup too quickly  It has it s place  and with frameworks like Angularjs  is the centerpiece    There needs to be an understanding that the whole  lt div id  myDiv  onClick  divFunction    gt Some Content lt  div gt  was shamed so heavily because it was abused by some developers  So it reached the point of sacrilegious proportions  much like tables  Some developers actually avoid tables for tabular data  It s the perfect example of people acting without understanding    Although I like the idea of keeping my behaviour seperate from my views  I see no issue with the markup declaring what it does  not how it does it  that s behaviour   It might be in the form of an actual onClick attribute  or a custom attribute  much like bootstraps javascript components    This way  by glancing just at the markup  you can see what is does  instead of trying to reverse lookup javascript event binders    So  as a third alternative to the above  using data attributes to declarativly announce the behaviour within the markup  Behaviour is kept out of the view  but at a glance you can see what is happening     Bootstrap example    lt button type  button  class  btn btn-lg btn-danger  data-toggle  popover  title  Popover title  data-content  And here s some amazing content  It s very engaging  Right   gt Click to toggle popover lt  button gt    Source  http   getbootstrap com javascript  popovers  Note The main disadvantage with the second example is the pollution of global namespace  This can be circumvented by either using the third alternative above  or frameworks like Angular and their ng-click attributes with automatically scope

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Neither one is better in that they may be used for different purposes  onClick  should actually be onclick  performs very slightly better  but I highly doubt you will notice a difference there   It is worth noting that they do different things   click can be bound to any jQuery collection whereas onclick has to be used inline on the elements you want it to be bound to  You can also bind only one event to using onclick  whereas  click lets you continue to bind events   In my opinion  I would be consistent about it and just use  click everywhere and keep all of my JavaScript code together and separated from the HTML   Don t use onclick  There isn t any reason to use it unless you know what you re doing  and you probably don t

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You could combine them  use jQuery to bind the function to the click   lt div id  myDiv  gt Some Content lt  div gt       myDiv   click divFunction    function divFunction       some code

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lt whatever onclick  doStuff     onmouseover  in    onmouseout  out      gt    onclick  onmouseover  onmouseout  etc  events are actually bad for performance  in Internet nbsp Explorer mainly  go figure   If you code using Visual Studio  when you run a page with these  every single one of these will create a separate SCRIPT block taking up memory  and thus slowing down performance   Not to mention you should have a separation of concerns  JavaScript and layouts should be separated   It is always better to create evenHandlers for any of these events  one event can capture hundreds thousands of items  instead of creating thousands of separate script blocks for each one    Also  everything everyone else is saying

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Performance There are already many good answers here however  authors sometimes mention about performance but actually nobody investigate it yet - so I will focus on this aspect here  Today I perform test on Chrome 83 0  Safari 13 1 and Firefox 77 0 for solutions mention in question and additionally few alternative solutions  some of them was mention in other answers   Results I compare here solutions A-H because they operate on elements id  I also show results for solutions which use class  I J K  as reference   solution based on html-inline handler binding  B  is fast and fastest for Chrome and fastest for small number of elements solutions based on getElementById  C D  are fast  and for big number of elements fastest on Safari and Firefox referenced solutions I J based are fastest for big num of elements so It is worth to consider use class instead id approach in this case solution based on jQuery click  A  is slowest   Details Actually It was not easy to design performance test for this question  I notice that for all tested solutions  performance of triggering events for 10K div-s was fast and manually I was not able to detect any differences between them  you can run below snippet to check it yourself   So I focus on measure execution time of generate html and bind event handlers for two cases  10 divs - you can run test HERE 1000 divs - you can run test HERE   x000D   x000D     https   stackoverflow com questions 12627443 jquery-click-vs-onclick let a      Array 10000     function clean     test innerHTML       console clear      function divFunction el      console log  clicked on    el id        function initA       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt      myDiv  i    click e  gt  divFunction e target        function initB       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  onclick  divFunction this   gt   i  lt  div gt    join       function initC       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt  document getElementById  myDiv  i    onclick   e  gt  divFunction e target        function initD       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt  document getElementById  myDiv  i    addEventListener  click   e  gt  divFunction e target         function initE       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt  document querySelector   myDiv  i    onclick   e  gt  divFunction e target        function initF       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt  document querySelector   myDiv  i    addEventListener  click   e  gt  divFunction e target         function initG       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt  window  myDiv  i    onclick   e  gt  divFunction e target        function initH       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join      a map  x i   gt  window  myDiv  i    addEventListener  click  e  gt  divFunction e target        function initI       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join          document querySelectorAll   box    map el   gt  el onclick   e  gt  divFunction e target       function initJ       test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join          document querySelectorAll   box    map el   gt  el addEventListener  click   e  gt  divFunction e target        function initK         test innerHTML   a map  x i   gt    lt div id  myDiv  i   class  box  gt   i  lt  div gt    join          box   click e  gt  divFunction e target         function measure f        console time  measure   f name     f      console timeEnd  measure   f name    x000D   test     display  flex    flex-wrap  wrap      box     margin  1px    height  10px    background  red    font-size  10px    cursor  pointer    x000D   lt script src  https   cdnjs cloudflare com ajax libs jquery 3 3 1 jquery min js  gt  lt  script gt   lt div gt This snippet only presents used solutions  Click to solution button and then click on any red box to trigger its handler lt  div gt   lt button onclick  measure initA   gt A lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initB   gt B lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initC   gt C lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initD   gt D lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initE   gt E lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initF   gt F lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initG   gt G lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initH   gt H lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initI   gt I lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initJ   gt J lt  button gt   lt button onclick  measure initK   gt K lt  button gt   lt button onclick  clean    gt Clean lt  button gt    lt div id  test  gt  lt  div gt  x000D   x000D   x000D   Here is example test for Chrome

User · Answer

Well  one of the main ideas behind jQuery is to separate JavaScript from the nasty HTML code  The first method is the way to go

User · Answer

IMHO  onclick is the preferred method over  click only when the following conditions are met    there are many elements on the page only one event to be registered for the click event You re worried about mobile performance battery life   I formed this opinion because of the fact that the JavaScript engines on mobile devices are 4 to 7 times slower than their desktop counterparts which were made in the same generation  I hate it when I visit a site on my mobile device and receive jittery scrolling because the jQuery is binding all of the events at the expense of my user experience and battery life  Another recent supporting factor  although this should only be a concern with government agencies      we had IE7 pop-up with a message box stating that JavaScript process is taking to long   wait or cancel process  This happened every time there were a lot of elements to bind to via jQuery

[javascript] jQuery.click() vs onClick

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