mouseleave

The mouseleave event is fired when the pointer of a pointing device (usually a mouse) is moved out of an element.

mouseleave and mouseout are similar but differ in that mouseleave does not bubble and mouseout does.
This means that mouseleave is fired when the pointer has exited the element and all of its descendants, whereas mouseout is fired when the pointer leaves the element or leaves one of the element's descendants (even if the pointer is still within the element).

One mouseleave event is sent to each element of the hierarchy when leaving them. Here 4 events are sent to the four elements of the hierarchy when the pointer moves from the text to an area outside of the most outer div represented here.	One single mouseout event is sent to the deepest element of the DOM tree, then it bubbles up the hierarchy until it is canceled by a handler or reaches the root.

General info

Specification

DOM L3

Interface

MouseEvent

Bubbles

No

Cancelable

No

Target

element()

Default Action

None

Properties

Examples

The mouseout documentation has an example illustrating the difference between mouseout and mouseleave.

The following example illustrates how to use mouseout, to simulate the principle of event delegation for the mouseleave event.

<ul id="test">
  <li>
    <ul class="leave-sensitive">
      <li>item 1-1</li>
      <li>item 1-2</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>
    <ul class="leave-sensitive">
      <li>item 2-1</li>
      <li>item 2-2</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>
<script>
  var delegationSelector = ".leave-sensitive";
  document.getElementById("test").addEventListener("mouseout", function( event ) {
    var target = event.target,
        related = event.relatedTarget,
        match;
    // search for a parent node matching the delegation selector
    while ( target && target != document && !( match = matches( target, delegationSelector ) ) ) {
        target = target.parentNode;
    }
    // exit if no matching node has been found
    if ( !match ) { return; }
    // loop through the parent of the related target to make sure that it's not a child of the target
    while ( related && related != target && related != document ) {
        related = related.parentNode;
    }
    // exit if this is the case
    if ( related == target ) { return; }
    // the "delegated mouseleave" handler can now be executed
    // change the color of the text
    target.style.color = "orange";
    // reset the color after a small amount of time
    setTimeout(function() {
        target.style.color = "";
    }, 500);
  }, false);
  // function used to check if a DOM element matches a given selector
  // the following code can be replaced by this IE8 compatible function: https://gist.github.com/2851541
  function matches( elem, selector ){
    // the matchesSelector is prefixed in most (if not all) browsers
    return elem.matchesSelector( selector );
  };
</script>

Browser compatibility

[1] Implemented in bug 236215.

[2] Implemented in bug 432698.

[3] Safari 7 fires the event in many situations where it's not allowed to, making the whole event useless. See bug 470258 for the description of the bug (it existed in old Chrome versions as well). Safari 8 has correct behavior

[4] Implemented in bug 218093.

See also

• mousedown
• mouseup
• mousemove
• click
• dblclick
• mouseover
• mouseout
• mouseenter
• mouseleave
• contextmenu