innerText works in IE but not in Firefox

Question

I have some JavaScript code that works in IE containing the following   myElement innerText    foo     However  it seems that the  innerText  property does not work in Firefox   Is there some Firefox equivalent   Or is there a more generic  cross browser property that can be used

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jQuery provides a  text   method that can be used in any browser  For example       myElement   text  Foo

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Note that the Element  innerText property will not contain the text which has been hidden by CSS style  display none  in Google Chrome  as well it will drop the content that has been masked by other CSS technics  including font-size 0  color transparent  and a few other similar effects that cause the text not to be rendered in any visible way    Other CSS properties are also considered     First the  display   style of inner elements is parsed to determine if it delimits a block content  such as  display block  which is the default of HTML block elements in the browser s builtin stylesheet  and whose behavior as not been overriden by your own CSS style   if so a newline will be inserted in the value of the innerText property  This won t happen with the textContent property  The CSS properties that generate inline contents will also be considered   for example the inline element  lt br   gt  that generates an inline newline will also generate an newline in the value of innerText  The  display inline  style causes no newline either in textContent or innerText  The  display table  style generates newlines around the table and between table rows  but display table-cell  will generate a tabulation character  The  position absolute  property  used with display block or display inline  it does not matter  will also cause a line break to be inserted  Some browsers will also include a single space separation between spans   But Element  textContent will still contain ALL contents of inner text elements independantly of the applied CSS even if they are invisible  And no extra newlines or whitespaces will be generated in textContent  which just ignores all styles and the structure and inline block or positioned types of inner elements   A copy paste operation using mouse selection will discard the hidden text in the plain-text format that is put in the clipboard  so it won t contain everything in the textContent  but only what is within innerText  after whitespace newline generation as above    Both properties are then supported in Google Chrome  but their content may then be different  Older browsers still included in innetText everything like what textContent now contains  but their behavior in relation with then generation of whitespaces newlines was inconsistant    jQuery will solve these inconsistencies between browsers using the   text    method added to the parsed elements it returns via a     query  Internally  it solves the difficulties by looking into the HTML DOM  working only with the  node  level  So it will return something looking more like the standard textContent   The caveat is that that this jQuery method will not insert any extra spaces or line breaks that may be visible on screen caused by subelements  like  lt br   gt   of the content   If you design some scripts for accessibility and your stylesheet is parsed for non-aural rendering  such as plugins used to communicate with a Braille reader  this tool should use the textContent if it must include the specific punctuation signs that are added in spans styled with  display none  and that are typically included in pages  for example for superscripts subscripts   otherwise the innerText will be very confusive on the Braille reader   Texts hidden by CSS tricks are now typically ignored by major search engines  that will also parse the CSS of your HTML pages  and will also ignore texts that are not in contrasting colors on the background  using an HTML CSS parser and the DOM property  innerText  exactly like in modern visual browsers  at least this invisible content will not be indexed so hidden text cannot be used as a trick to force the inclusion of some keywords in the page to check its content    but this hidden text will be stil displayed in the result page  if the page was still qualified from the index to be included in results   using the  textContent  property instead of the full HTML to strip the extra styles and scripts   IF you assign some plain-text in any one of these two properties  this will overwrite the inner markup and styles applied to it  only the assigned element will keep its type  attributes and styles   so both properties will then contain the same content  However  some browsers will now no longer honor the write to innerText  and will only let you overwrite the textContent property  you cannot insert HTML markup when writing to these properties  as HTML special characters will be properly encoded using numeric character references to appear literally  if you then read the innerHTML property after the assignment of innerText or textContent

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myElement innerText   myElement textContent    foo     Edit  thanks to Mark Amery for the comment below   Only do it this way if you know beyond a reasonable doubt that no code will be relying on checking the existence of these properties  like  for example  jQuery does   But if you are using jQuery  you would probably just use the  text  function and do     myElement   text  foo   as some other answers show

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It s also possible to emulate innerText behavior in other browsers    if    typeof window HTMLElement       undefined    amp  amp    typeof HTMLElement prototype   defineGetter         undefined           HTMLElement prototype   defineGetter    innerText   function               if  this textContent                 return this textContent             else                var r   this ownerDocument createRange                 r selectNodeContents this                return r toString                             HTMLElement prototype   defineSetter    innerText   function  str             if  this textContent                 this textContent   str             else                this innerHTML   str replace   amp  g    amp amp    replace   gt  g    amp gt    replace   lt  g    amp lt    replace   n g    lt br   gt  n

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What about something like this      elem is the jQuery object passed along   var  currentText    elem context firstChild data toUpperCase         I needed to make mine uppercase

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As in 2016 from Firefox v45  innerText works on firefox  take a look at its support  http   caniuse com  search innerText  If you want it to work on previous versions of Firefox  you can use textContent  which has better support on Firefox but worse on older IE versions  http   caniuse com  search textContent

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Just reposting from comments under the original post  innerHTML works in all browsers  Thanks stefita   myElement innerHTML    foo

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Firefox uses the W3C-compliant textContent property   I d guess Safari and Opera also support this property

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innerText has been added to Firefox and should be available in the FF45 release  https   bugzilla mozilla org show bug cgi id 264412  A draft spec has been written and is expected to be incorporated into the HTML living standard in the future  http   rocallahan github io innerText-spec   https   github com whatwg html issues 465  Note that currently the Firefox  Chrome and IE implementations are all incompatible  Going forward  we can probably expect Firefox  Chrome and Edge to converge while old IE remains incompatible   See also  https   github com whatwg compat issues 5

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If you only need to set text content and not retrieve  here s a trivial DOM version you can use on any browser  it doesn t require either the IE innerText extension or the DOM Level 3 Core textContent property   function setTextContent element  text        while  element firstChild   null          element removeChild element firstChild      remove all existing content     element appendChild document createTextNode text

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Update  I wrote a blog post detailing all the differences much better     Firefox uses W3C standard Node  textContent  but its behavior differs  slightly  from that of MSHTML s proprietary innerText  copied by Opera as well  some time ago  among dozens of other MSHTML features    First of all  textContent whitespace representation is different from innerText one  Second  and more importantly  textContent includes all of SCRIPT tag contents  whereas innerText doesn t   Just to make things more entertaining  Opera - besides implementing standard textContent - decided to also add MSHTML s innerText but changed it to act as textContent - i e  including SCRIPT contents  in fact  textContent and innerText in Opera seem to produce identical results  probably being just aliased to each other    textContent is part of Node interface  whereas innerText is part of HTMLElement  This  for example  means that you can  retrieve  textContent but not innerText from text nodes   var el   document createElement  p    var textNode   document createTextNode  x     el textContent        el innerText         textNode textContent      x  textNode innerText     undefined   Finally  Safari 2 x also has buggy innerText implementation  In Safari  innerText functions properly only if an element is neither hidden  via style display     none   nor orphaned from the document  Otherwise  innerText results in an empty string   I was playing with textContent abstraction  to work around these deficiencies   but it turned out to be rather complex   You best bet is to first define your exact requirements and follow from there  It is often possible to simply strip tags off of innerHTML of an element  rather than deal with all of the possible textContent innerText deviations   Another possibility  of course  is to walk the DOM tree and collect text nodes recursively

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As per Prakash K s answer Firefox does not support the innerText property  So you can simply test whether the user agent supports this property and proceed accordingly as below   function changeText elem  changeVal        if  typeof elem textContent      undefined             elem textContent   changeVal        else           elem innerText   changeVal

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A really simple line of Javascript can get the  non-taggy  text in all main browsers     var myElement   document getElementById  anyElementId    var myText    myElement innerText    myElement textContent

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This has been my experience with innerText  textContent  innerHTML  and value      elem innerText   changeVal      works on ie but not on ff or ch    elem setAttribute  innerText   changeVal      works on ie but not ff or ch    elem textContent   changeVal      works on ie but not ff or ch    elem setAttribute  textContent   changeVal       does not work on ie ff or ch    elem innerHTML   changeVal      ie causes error - doesn t work in ff or ch    elem setAttribute  innerHTML   changeVal     ie causes error doesn t work in ff or ch    elem value   changeVal     works in ie and ff -- see note 2 on ch    elem setAttribute  value   changeVal      ie works  see note 1 on ff and note 2 on ch   ie   internet explorer  ff   firefox  ch   google chrome  note 1  ff works until after value is deleted with backspace - see note by Ray Vega above  note 2  works somewhat in chrome - after update it is unchanged then you click away and click back into the field and the value appears  The best of the lot is elem value   changeVal  which I did not comment out above

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found this here    lt  -- if lte IE 8  gt       lt script type  text javascript  gt          if  Object defineProperty  amp  amp  Object getOwnPropertyDescriptor  amp  amp               Object getOwnPropertyDescriptor Element prototype   textContent   get             function                 var innerText   Object getOwnPropertyDescriptor Element prototype   innerText                Object defineProperty Element prototype   textContent                      It won t work if you just drop in innerText get                    and innerText set or the whole descriptor                  get   function                       return innerText get call this                                     set   function x                      return innerText set call this  x                                                                        lt  script gt   lt   endif -- gt

[javascript] 'innerText' works in IE, but not in Firefox

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