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’ve noticed that, unlike their desktop counterparts, very few of those web apps leverage the mouse’s “right click”. Most of the time, when right clicking in a web app, I get the standard browser right click menu.
I don’t believe it has to do with technical implementation since modifying the right click menu is quite trivial in Javascript.
Is there an actual reason that I am missing?
EDIT: The most popular reason seems to be that it’s not what user expect. Another mentioned reason was that some users disable Javascript – which is a valid answer -, but in our case, we can discard this possibility since we’re talking about applications that require Javascript regardless of the right click option.
Now, let me expand my question a bit:
- Do you think it should stay that way (do you really find the default browser right click menu useful) ?
- Would you like to see more application-specific right click menus where they could improve the user interface ?
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.