I am trying to find a fallback solution for browsers who do not interpret the placeholder attribute for input elements. I have this simple jQuery Script but it throws an Error

SecurityError: "The operation is insecure.
this.value = val;"

Here's my script:

$('document').ready(function(){
       $('input').each(function() {
           if ($(this).val() === '' || $(this).val() === undefined) {
               $(this).val($(this).attr('placeholder'));
           }
       });
});

Anyone any ideas what i can do? Or what i am doing wrong? Or what this error means? It happens in Firefox, haven't tested it in other Browsers yet.

I am trying to find a fallback solution for browsers who do not interpret the placeholder attribute for input elements. I have this simple jQuery Script but it throws an Error

SecurityError: "The operation is insecure.
this.value = val;"

Here's my script:

$('document').ready(function(){
       $('input').each(function() {
           if ($(this).val() === '' || $(this).val() === undefined) {
               $(this).val($(this).attr('placeholder'));
           }
       });
});

Anyone any ideas what i can do? Or what i am doing wrong? Or what this error means? It happens in Firefox, haven't tested it in other Browsers yet.

• javascript
• jquery

• 2 FWIW $(this).val() will never return undefined. – Felix Kling Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 15:35
• 1 Do you have any browser extensions or plugins running that could be disabling Javascript from modifying form values? – chrisfrancis27 Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 15:37
• Do you have password inputs on your page? Could you break the script down to a specific <input> element? – Bergi Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 15:55
• On a particular browser at some user location, I get this error when I try to save a text in browser's local storage. Must be some browser security setting. – Allen King Commented Feb 1, 2015 at 19:43

2 Answers 2

I have just fixed a similar problem in my project. It turned out that I was trying to set a value of a <input type="file" ...> input. It seems that you may be facing the same problem, because you are selecting all inputs of a document regardless of their type.

If you have firebug installed, try looking for the input that causes this error by inserting a log mand before trying to modify the input's value.

$('document').ready(function(){
       $('input').each(function() {
           if ($(this).val() === '' || $(this).val() === undefined) {

               // Log goes here
               window.console.log(
                   'There is an input without a value!', 
                   this);

               $(this).val($(this).attr('placeholder'));
           }
       });
});

I had an insecure warning in conjunction with antoher function. The reason there simply was, that a library function was called with an array given as parameter, but it expected an element (dom). The result was the expected, but I'm sure, this won't be in any case. So check if the types of your variables are the one you (or the other side) want's it to.