Can obssessive clickers be a problem?

I wonder if it is necessary to protect against obssessiev double-clickers

[phoenix_fly]

Hello my friends,

I am almost launching this website and the other day, at a friendŽs house, I said, hey, take a look at my website man, heres the adress. Everything ok, untill I say the mf double-clicking everything, links, buttons and all! I said: Hey, moron! YouŽre not in windows! One click! But he said, "oh, really, I thought web was double-click..."

I am worried about the scripts being triggered double too, and the first time, incompleted! Does this in fact happen?

Shall we put an onDblClick="alert('This is no windows, you stupid!A good user is a dead user!');"?

Thanks a lot!

phoenix_fly

[RammsteinNicCage]

I don't know if it's a problem with scripts, but I do know a lot of people that are not computer savvy (even if they are on a computer every day...) do double-click links.

Jennifer

[encyclo]

Most browsers, including IE and Opera, discard the double-click, recognizing it as redundant due to the standard behavior in Windows. It is a typical newbie mistake, but usually quite harmless as the technology protects you from it.

However, there is one increasingly popular browser which does not currently discount double-clicks: Firefox. There is a registered bug - #55279 in the Mozilla Bugzilla database, "double-click on a link generates two subsequent requests of a same URL" - which was opened in October 2000 which remains unfixed. Same goes for bug #238159, "Double clicking submit button causes forms to be submitted twice", again unfixed. This is a regression from Netscape 4 which handled double-clicks correctly. Note that the Mozilla suite also has the same bug, as does Netscape 6+ - however neither of these browsers has a significant market presence amongst non-technical users.

The result of these bugs? Firstly, a false impression of increased measured market share as unexerienced users are starting to use Firefox, an unnecessary increase in bandwidth utilisation, and for the second bug, an increase in duplicate orders from inexperienced Firefox users on e-comm sites. The effect is probably more significant than the concerns about pre-fetching which many claimed were unfairly inflating Firefox user numbers.

[jomaxx]

This can also arise if the site does not respond for a couple of seconds and the user tries clicking again.

There's a little snippet of Javascript code you can probably hunt down without too much trouble that prevents forms from being re-submitted once "submit" has been clicked the first time. I imagine it could be easily adapted to also handle HREF links that invoke scripts.

[phoenix_fly]

Hey Encyclo and Jomaxx,

Thanks a lot for the precise info. IŽm happy to hear that most browsers take care of the obssessive web shoppers. IŽll see if Firefox users can be a problem before going into extra work to prevent this.

Take care

phoenix_fly