don't do that on IE where there are potentially a lot of <a>-tags. IE behaves really, really badly once a selector matches a large amount of elements (there mus

don't do that on IE where there are potentially a lot of <a>-tags. IE behaves really, really badly once a selector matches a large amount of elements (there must be something O(n^2) going on somehwere). This is what delegate() was invented for. $(document).delegate('a.nodefault', 'click', function(e){ e.preventDefault(); } I'm using a .nodefault class selector such that it applies only to links marked with class="nodefault" - you might want to have links that should work normally. If you're using HTML5, using a data-yourapp-nodefault=true attribute might be even better as you shouldn't overload classes. Incidentally, returning false; in a directly bound handler (which is was the original article was talking about) prevents exactly this suggestion here from working as the delegated handler on document would never see the click.