Is it a bug for a checkbox's state to change before the click event handler fires?

Question

While answering another question, I encountered something I thought was very odd behavior, and I'm wondering if this should be considered a bug or if it is somewhere in the specification.

This behavior can be observed at this jsFiddle.

Given the following input checkbox element:

<input type="checkbox" id="check" />

If you were to apply the following click event handler (we'll use jQuery here to keep the example concise):

$('#check').on('click', function (e) {
    console.log(this.checked);
    return false; //This prevents the default action from occurring.
});

You'd see in the developer console:

true

What actually happens here is that the checkbox's state is changing before it enters the click event handler. However, if the click event handler prevents the default action, the state of the checkbox is reverted.

This seems like a bug to me. I would expect the checkbox's state to only update after the click event handler, if the default action is not prevented.

Is this a bug? Is this something that should be reported to the different browser distributors?

(I've only tested this in Chrome currently)

Answer 1

I don't believe that this is a bug, but if you think about it for a second it makes perfect sense as to why the console's output is True

On the initial click of checkbox the value is set to true. It is only set to false AFTER you print to the console via the return false; statement. So no matter how many times you try it, the output will always say True