Why isn't “right click” more used in web applications?

Question

More and more applications are moving to the cloud: Google Docs for productivity apps, Meebo for instant messaging, Gmail for e-mails, Salesforce for CRM, etc.

Yet, I\'

Answer 1

Just for completeness: Opera has no oncontextmenu and no simple possibility to suppress the context menu on right click.

Answer 2

It's not what users expect.

It's also not particularly "discoverable": like old-school Flash web sites where you had to roll your mouse over a graphic to get the site to do something, right-clicking is not necessarily intuitive.

Answer 3

Also, because some people may not have a two-button mouse (I'm looking at you, Apple users).

Answer 4

It is not how people are used to work in their browser, you shouldn't change default behavior. Users aren't expecting something to happen when they rightclick.

Answer 5

As i read in your forst anwser this is true it would be in the context menu it might mess with some things but as i have madde a btoolbar thta floats for my site to do anything you can use keyboard shortcuts so i see a mild and doom future for right click at all i see toolbars everywhree on websites today

Answer 6

Most users expect the right-click menu to bring up the browser context menu, so doing it to bring up an app-specific menu is not something they would try.