How do I programmatically click on an element in JavaScript?

In IE, I can just call element.click() from JavaScript - how do I accomplish the same task in Firefox? Ideally I'd like to have some JavaScript that would work equally well cross-browser, but if necessary I'll have different per-browser JavaScript for this.

The document.createEvent documentation says that "The createEvent method is deprecated. Use event constructors instead."

So you should use this method instead:

var clickEvent = new MouseEvent("click", {
    "view": window,
    "bubbles": true,
    "cancelable": false
});

and fire it on an element like this:

element.dispatchEvent(clickEvent);

as shown here.

For firefox links appear to be "special". The only way I was able to get this working was to use the createEvent described here on MDN and call the initMouseEvent function. Even that didn't work completely, I had to manually tell the browser to open a link...

var theEvent = document.createEvent("MouseEvent");
theEvent.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null);
var element = document.getElementById('link');
element.dispatchEvent(theEvent);

while (element)
{
    if (element.tagName == "A" && element.href != "")
    {
        if (element.target == "_blank") { window.open(element.href, element.target); }
        else { document.location = element.href; }
        element = null;
    }
    else
    {
        element = element.parentElement;
    }
}

Using jQuery you can do exactly the same thing, for example:

$("a").click();

Which will "click" all anchors on the page.

element.click() is a standard method outlined by the W3C DOM specification. Mozilla's Gecko/Firefox follows the standard and only allows this method to be called on INPUT elements.

Are you trying to actually follow the link or trigger the onclick? You can trigger an onclick with something like this:

var link = document.getElementById(linkId);
link.onclick.call(link);

Here's a cross browser working function (usable for other than click handlers too):

function eventFire(el, etype){
    if (el.fireEvent) {
	  el.fireEvent('on' + etype);
    } else {
	  var evObj = document.createEvent('Events');
	  evObj.initEvent(etype, true, false);
	  el.dispatchEvent(evObj);
    }
}

I used KooiInc's function listed above but I had to use two different input types one 'button' for IE and one 'submit' for FireFox. I am not exactly sure why but it works.

// HTML

<input type="button" id="btnEmailHidden" style="display:none" />
<input type="submit" id="btnEmailHidden2" style="display:none" />

// in JavaScript

var hiddenBtn = document.getElementById("btnEmailHidden");

if (hiddenBtn.fireEvent) {
    hiddenBtn.fireEvent('onclick');
    hiddenBtn[eType]();
}
else {
    // dispatch for firefox + others
    var evObj = document.createEvent('MouseEvent');
    evObj.initEvent(eType, true, true);
    var hiddenBtn2 = document.getElementById("btnEmailHidden2");
    hiddenBtn2.dispatchEvent(evObj);
}

I have search and tried many suggestions but this is what ended up working. If I had some more time I would have liked to investigate why submit works with FF and button with IE but that would be a luxury right now so on to the next problem.