I recently had this debate with my friend, who built this fun test to see how much latency was actually added by waiting for mouseUp: https://click-duration-tim

I recently had this debate with my friend, who built this fun test to see how much latency was actually added by waiting for mouseUp: https://click-duration-timer.vercel.app/ https://click-duration-timer.vercel.app/ I felt pretty strongly that I would hate triggering events on mouseDown because of how often I "cancel" an action mid-click. But I decided to add this userscript to my browser and live with it for a week: let preventNextClick = false; const interactiveElements = ['a', 'button', 'input', 'select', 'textarea']; document.addEventListener('mousedown', (event) => { if (event.metaKey) return; // allow cmd+click to bail if (event.button !== 0) return; // handle left clicks only // ignore all but a handful of elements const tagName = event.target.tagName.toLowerCase(); if (!interactiveElements.includes(tagName)) return; event.target.click(); // set a flag to prevent firing two click events preventNextClick = true; }); document.addEventListener('click', (event) => { if (preventNextClick) { event.stopImmediatePropagation(); event.preventDefault(); preventNextClick = false; } }, true); // use capture phase This causes any of the interactive elements on a page to trigger their onClick action during the mouseDown phase rather than onMouseUp. It's probably not perfect, just a scrappy user script. But omg it is so much nicer to browse with this enabled. And I say that as a hater of the original idea with strong opinions. So, if you want to have a slightly more informed opinion on the issue I suggest trying this or something like it out for a week! I can't go back to the way it was before. Everything is so snappy now. I haven't (yet) found a case where I wished I had the mid-click cancelability I had before. I think that getting used to the idea of clicks being instant rewired my brain a bit to simply not rely on that behavior anymore.