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Comment by gabipurcaru | Hacker News Reader

My one contention with click menus is that clicking on _anything_ has a nonzero chance of accidentally navigating away from the page, depending on the particular website's implementation (and depending on whether the JS assets have finished loading). Hover menus are risk free in this regard

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Which would not be a problem if sites wouldn't make it increasingly impossible to open links in new tabs.

Will clicking the link delete all progress? Better click with the middle mouse button. Now there's another set of possibilities: 1) the linked site opens in a new tab, 2) nothing happens, 3) an empty tab opens, 4) a tab containing a borked site opens, 5) the button is so broken the browser can't even recognise it as interactive UI element and instead turns on autoscrolling.

Yes, please give me hover menus, and when you're at it use links for links. HTML tags aren't just there as suggestions for weird JSX component names.

6) the site uses Javascript to disable the default action and reimplements it, treating middle clicks as left-clicks and browsing away from the current page instead of opening a new tab.

Jira does this in several places, but not everywhere.

I have a hard time not smashing my laptop when this happens.

Atlassian software is definitely the champion in creating unexpected behavior within their apps. I'm using Tridactyl to use vim motions in my browser and they've made it entirely impossible for me to search within a page as they capture '/' to open the issue search.

Using a phone basically gives me the motor control of a toddler. Stuff pops up on hover, or the page jumps down because of some laggy ad, and I'm clicking on stuff inadvertently and swearing at clouds all the time. The best menus for me avoid that by being in the same place on the page and being big targets.

That’s one thing the article forgets. Going with a click rather than hover means you need to implement the “one click to select, double to activate” if things can be activated inadvertently with a single click.

I’m familiar with this issue as I’ve been trying to abandon excess hover effects and switch to clicks in apps I build on web stack. It’s difficult since most good UI frameworks rely on hover effects, and requires care in preventing accidental actions from a single click if you want your users to go with your paradigm and not hate you.

> Hover menus are risk free in this regard

Well, the web site is perfectly _capable_ of using an onmouseover trigger to navigate you away from the page you're on. You have to trust them not to be jerks about it.

Clicking is pretty much the same thing.

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