Tell HN: The Internet needs context menus | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: The Internet needs context menus

2 pointsjhuckestein4 comments

Last week I switched from the Apple/MobileMe/iPhone ecosystem to an everything Google ecosystem. I have since been using Google's webapps, most notably the mail, calendar and reader.

The biggest difference to native apps I noticed is that there are no right-click context menus. I am conditioned to right-click on objects that I want to do stuff with. I think this is a very useful und powerful convention and I regularly get frustrated when it doesn't work in webapps.

Is there a reason that so few webapps implement context menus? Am I the only one who misses them? Is there a solution?

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You're conditioned to right-click on an object coming from an Apple ecosystem? Coming from a mostly PC background, but with an OSX laptop, the total lack of importance given to right-clicking (ctrl-clicking) or context menus is the thing I most associate with the Apple ecosystem.

I would guess there's a jQuery plugin or three (or a plugin from another framework) that would do this.

I see two major issues why you wouldn't want to do it though. One, you're already in an app with a context menu, ie the browser. How do you deal with overriding its context menu while staying out of the way? Two, touch devices can't emulate a right click (like they can't emulate hover). Major bummer for accessibility, especially if your app is designed to leverage context menus heavily.

You might consider something along the lines of a context menu button, which you could put next to actionable items and would take a direct click to pop open a menu. Of course, that's just a menu bar stuck somewhere in the page. Whether or not it would be worth the trouble I guess is application specific.

Those are exactly the two issues I had in mind, too.

For touch devices, Android's policy seems to be click+hold to enable context menus.

And the issue with the browser's context menu is the reason why this probably needs standardization.

Ah, you're right. iPhone use touch + hold extensively as well and I would assume the other touch devices do (because there's not much else to work with).

I guess you could re-create the functionality normally present in the browser's context menu (maybe they expose that somewhere, I don't know much about browser design) while adding in your own application-specific commands, but that's another nightmare in dealing with a host of different browsers.

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