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

Mac don't have a "right mouse button", likewise with a lot of touch screen phones etc.

Even on a windows application most normal users (not programmers or power users) don’t think to right clicking when they wish to do something, if they have not learned it off by heart to do the given task they wish to do.

(Also right clicking on most web pages brings up a menu that a normal user does not understand, so they don’t try it more then once.)

So you always have to provide another way of doing the operation anyway.

Answer 2

Giving javascript control over right-clicks gives you something like this: http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/24.html. I really love this website, but its attempts to keep me from copying text or images (whatever it's trying to do) seriously interfere with my web usage patterns. I always open things in other tabs. I always the right click menu to access the "back" command.

It also irritates me to no end when some web site has a flash animation somewhere that steals my control key (so I can no longer Ctrl+Tab to flip to another tab.

My bottom line: web applications can't supersede the local computer's built in commands. If a web application starts taking over control keys, right clicks, etc., it has crossed the line between local and remote applications. That is a very important line to keep crystal clear.

Answer 3

I believe a very valid approach to web applications is to still keep all the browser features enabled, such as back button, opening things in new tabs, bookmarking, changing font-sizes, and so on.

The browser's right-click context menu is something that I do not want to have taken away by an app.

Now, when you start moving the web app out of the browser into its own window (turning it into a dedicated application, such as Fluid does, and I believe Chrome OS will), without URL bar and back button, then we can talk about the context-menu.

Answer 4

You shouldn't fiddle with the right click because of a a little thing we call Best Practices! Don't take away my rights as a user to control my experience! I want my right click to do what right clicks do!

The best practice is to make this sort of thing optional to the user. If you want to modify this behavior, make it something users can control in their profile or in the application settings.

For example:

(click to enable)
[ ] Use super special awesome right-click menu 

Answer 5

It is due to a inconsistency between the concept of browsing (which is browser centric) and the use of a web-application (which is application centric, the browser being only the renderer). The right click button would make sense in the second case, but as the web is made for browsing resources, this introduces an ambiguity it will probably never be solved.

Kind of interesting, the fact that the most touted deficiency in macs is the single button mouse, and then the most used interface in the world, the web, is single-button centric.

Answer 6

I see two reasons. First of all, people might have javascript turned off, today that might not be the biggest issue of all but it's been following developers since the dawn of web-dev. Which brings us to the second reason, it's not what the users expect.

If you were to talk to someone about usability on the web and you had "hidden" features which were only made visible on right-click(browser context menu popup), this would probably be counted as bad design just because most users aren't use to the idea that the web is evolving into something more than just links and left-clicks(navigation clicking).