[PSA] Firefox has this built in already: Hold Shift while right-clicking. Been a while since I tested on a fresh profile, but I don’t believe this requires any preference tweaking or about:config stuff.
There's a about:config setting called dom.event.contextmenu.enabled defaulting to true, when you change to false you don't need to hold shift, it will always open the browser context menu (and in most cases still do the page behavior of showing the web app context menu or whatever, you can then press esc to close the browser's menu but it may also close the page menu depending on how they implemented it).
Then there's a second option called dom.event.contextmenu.shift_suppresses_event which defaults to true and does what you said: Simple right click opens the page menu and shift + right click don't send the page the event at all and instead opens the browser's menu.
I assume there's something similar for Safari on Mac, but I don't know.
When I run into a site that doesn't want to let me select/copy text, I screen shot the page -- in Photos on iOS, and in Preview on MacOS, selecting text out of an image generally works great. Just tap and hold a moment on iOS, or hover a moment on MacOS, and then drag/click-drag to select.
I remember disabling right click on a geocities site I built for my friends to show off their hand-drawn comics. Another guy in our 4th grade class was rehosting our comics on his geocities so I disabled right click.
Wonder if this works on copy/download protected Google Docs. They had some pretty interesting protections, but could still be circumvented by looking at page source.
The vast majority of websites that disable it, they're actually doing it to provide additional functionality which would be lost otherwise.
Seems like using a sledgehammer to snap a button.
I have no clue what websites you are visiting, but the ones I have used typically either do it to disable/customize copy/paste or use it to track your actions. They often make too many assumptions about the browser in general.
How about we just stop allowing this and call it what it is - disabling functionality of my system without my explicit permission - and start charging these site operators with CFAA violations.
reply