I’ve seen a lot of people use return false in place of e.preventDefault. This is usually when dealing with setting the click event on a hyperlink. I can only think that this comes from the original JavaScript snippets of running code on a click by setting onclick="alert('hi'); return false".

This is wrong

Well - it might be wrong. It all depends on your application. As long as you know the differences in them, you should be fine:

• e.preventDefault: this (aptly) prevents the default event from happening. In the case of a hyperlink that you want to assign JavaScript to, this will stop the link from going to the location of the link
• e.stopPropagation: this stops the event from bubbling up. If you click on something that had a click event then using this will stop the event bubbling up and any click event that the parent containers might have.
• return false: this is the same as calling both of the methods above.

I’ve done two examples for this:

1. Showing the difference in e.preventDefault() and return false: This example works on the click event and shows that preventDefault and return false are actually different.
2. Example of e.stopPropagation: This example shows a practical example of when you’d want to stop an event bubbling up. It uses event handlers on the mouseover event to show this.