How do I programmatically click on an element in JavaScript?

For firefox links appear to be "special". The only way I was able to get this working was to use the createEvent described here on MDN and call the initMouseEvent function. Even that didn't work completely, I had to manually tell the browser to open a link...

var theEvent = document.createEvent("MouseEvent");
theEvent.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null);
var element = document.getElementById('link');
element.dispatchEvent(theEvent);

while (element)
{
    if (element.tagName == "A" && element.href != "")
    {
        if (element.target == "_blank") { window.open(element.href, element.target); }
        else { document.location = element.href; }
        element = null;
    }
    else
    {
        element = element.parentElement;
    }
}

Using jQuery you can do exactly the same thing, for example:

$("a").click();

Which will "click" all anchors on the page.

element.click() is a standard method outlined by the W3C DOM specification. Mozilla's Gecko/Firefox follows the standard and only allows this method to be called on INPUT elements.

Are you trying to actually follow the link or trigger the onclick? You can trigger an onclick with something like this:

var link = document.getElementById(linkId);
link.onclick.call(link);

Here's a cross browser working function (usable for other than click handlers too):

function eventFire(el, etype){
    if (el.fireEvent) {
      el.fireEvent('on' + etype);
    } else {
      var evObj = document.createEvent('Events');
      evObj.initEvent(etype, true, false);
      el.dispatchEvent(evObj);
    }
}