When to use PreventDefault( ) vs Return false?
Firstly, in JavaScript’s event model, you will come across a concept called as event bubbling (which makes an event to propagate from child element to a parent element). In order to avoid such kind of bubbling effect, many developers use an event method called “stopPropagation( )”. Alternatively, developers have started to use “return false” statement to stop such propagation.
Now, there is another terminology called “preventDefault( )”. As the name indicates, this method prevents any default behavior of an element to trigger. Best use case is to prevent an anchor tag to open a link.
You may come across a scenario where you would like to prevent the anchor tag from opening a link (default behavior) as well as stop the event from going up to the parent.
In such situation, instead of writing two lines of code, you can get it done in single line i.e; “return false”.