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Comment by manachar | Hacker News Reader

It's a touch focused pattern. With a keyboard and mouse you had the ability to right-click or use a modifier key while clicking to bring up more options.

For more and more users touch is going to be their primary experience and eventually you are going to need some method to provide more options to the "power users". Longer-click seems the most obvious and common of the patterns.

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Right-click in the browser is hardly more discoverable than long-press. I can't think of a website that uses right-click.

Google Drive makes use of it, as do thousands of desktop programs.

Yes. Desktop programs use it and I expect it there. On websites I generally expect my browsers normal right click menu and won't think to try right click on your web-app (especially if your web-app falls into the large number that should be simpler websites).

Most people won't even realise that a web-app can have a right click context menu (even those that use right click in their desktop programs all the time).

However, Facebook's long-press function makes sense inside an app. It's less a webapp there, and more a desktop app--even though it's interfacing with the Internet, it's presented standalone, not as a place to go within another program. You don't expect to see the browser's long-press menu in the Facebook app, because there is no browser.

As for desktop, if they're intelligent at all, they'll use a different method there. Perhaps all the new variations will be displayed side by side. Perhaps instead of only trigfering on a "long-click", it'll expand on a normal click.

Really though? What do you do in the context menu within a browser (assuming you are not a developer looking for view source/inspect element type things?) If that was not my day job I would have absolutely no use for the browser's context menu.

Correct. I do virtually nothing with it within the browser. But I don't even think about it as a possibility - so if you put functionality in the right click menu on a website/webapp I would have basically zero chance of finding it. I don't think I'm alone.

Desktop applications are a different story.

JIRA uses right click, and I hate those fuckers. But that's a rant about JIRA...

Our web app uses right click in a few places mainly as a convenience to power users. The same functionality can be found by using visual indicators, but may take a couple more clicks.

Overall I agree with the parent comment. Right click and long-press are hard for non-power users to find/discover.

Google does, inside Spreadsheet, Docs, etc.

Right click on the desktop is no more discoverable, yet it's use is pervasive and it's universally understood. Discoverability isn't the only criterion for a "good UI". Frankly for something like Facebook (on which the median user spends hours a day) it's probably not even the most important one.

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