773210 - a:active does not work in case we use event.preventDefault() in mousedown event handler

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 771241

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[chestozo]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Build ID: 20120614114901

Steps to reproduce:

I have an anchor element on the page with :hover and :active states defined in CSS.

In JavaScript I am listening for the mousedown event and I am preventing it's default behaviour by calling event.preventDefault() method.


Actual results:

When I mouse press on the anchor -- I do not see the :active state styling.

I have created a demo for the case:
http://jsbin.com/azajex/2


Expected results:

I am expecting the anchor element to by styled according to CSS specified.
It works in Chrome, Opera, IE.

Comment 1

[mjh563]

This appears to be a duplicate of bug 771241.

Comment 2

[Alice0775 White]

Regression window
Good:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1a1pre) Gecko/2008072103 Shiretoko/3.1a1pre ID:2008072103
Bad:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1a1pre) Gecko/2008072203 Shiretoko/3.1a1pre ID:2008072203
pushlog:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?startdate=2008-07-21+00%3A00%3A00&enddate=2008-07-22+04%3A00%3A00

may be due to Bug 416317 ?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Well, the testcase uses the selectors API to add the event listener, so a build without said API will simply not have the listener installed.

But if you add the listener some other way, the behavior has been this way forever and is quite purposeful.