---
name: Middle click
slug: middle-click
category: interaction
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A press of the scroll wheel button, conventionally used to open a
  link in a new tab, close a tab, or start autoscrolling.
aliases:
  - name: wheel click
    source: community
  - name: middle mouse button
    source: community
  - name: auxiliary click
    source: mdn
tags:
  - pointer
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - secondary-click
    - double-click
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "MDN: Element auxclick event"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/auxclick_event
  - title: "MDN: Pointer events"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_events
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the wheel press, not the left or right button
---

The wheel is a button, and pressing it means something specific in every desktop browser.
On a link it opens the destination in a new tab without leaving the page, which is the whole
point: a reader working through a list of results collects the interesting ones and keeps
their place. On a tab it closes that tab. On empty page background it starts autoscroll,
the mode where the page keeps scrolling in whatever direction the pointer is held from the
anchor. Three jobs, one button, and none of them announced anywhere in the interface.

In the DOM this is `auxclick`, an event browsers introduced precisely so that middle and
back and forward presses stopped arriving as `click`. A handler reads `event.button`, where
0 is primary, 1 is the wheel, and 2 is the one that raises the
[secondary click](/secondary-click) menu. Two details bite. The browser's own middle-click
behaviour is attached to a real anchor with a real `href`, so a link built as a `div` with a
click handler has no middle-click behaviour at all, and no amount of `auxclick` code gives it
back the browser's own tab handling. And on Windows and Linux a middle press on the page
starts autoscroll unless the `mousedown` is cancelled, which is why a page that wants to
handle the button itself has to say so at press time rather than at click time.

Web applications forget it constantly, and the failure is always the same shape. A results
list, a file tree, or a message list is built out of clickable rows rather than links, so
middle-clicking a row does nothing, and every reader who has ever collected tabs from a list
of results discovers that this particular list refuses to. The fix is not more JavaScript: it
is to render the thing that navigates as an anchor with an `href`, let the browser handle the
modifiers and the wheel press, and add behaviour on top. That single change also buys
Ctrl-click and Cmd-click, drag to bookmark, copy link address, and open in a new window, all
of which are the same affordance seen from different angles.

None of this makes the button safe to depend on. Trackpads mostly have no middle button,
tablets and phones have none at all, and assistive setups may remap it, so a wheel press can
only ever be a shortcut for something reachable another way. Linux adds a fourth convention
that surprises everyone who meets it, pasting the primary selection wherever the wheel is
pressed, which is worth knowing about mostly because it explains stray text appearing in a
field nobody typed into.