

Tell HN: The Internet needs context menus - jhuckestein

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.<p>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.<p>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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_delirium
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.

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mbenjaminsmith
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.

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jhuckestein
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.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
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.

