Right Click, a Missing Feature of the Web

I've always been a fan of right clicks and pop-up menus. Despite their ugly look, they are handy, especially when dealing with objects in an application (such as shapes in a Word document, cells in an Excel spreadsheet or files and folders in an explorer window). Such menus provide users with a convenient way to run commands that are related to a particular object or a specific surface. Whenever I'm using a new application, I instinctively do a lot of right clicks to interact with the application.

Right click gestures (and pop-up menus) were so handy that even companies such as Apple have started embedding them in their products. Apple was resisting the idea by designing 1-key mice for years until they added a secondary button to their recent mouse prototypes (although they still seem invisible). By default, the pop-up menu feature is not set in Mac OS, but users have the option to enable them. I reckon they are useful in point-and-click platforms (not touch-based interfaces) and help software designers to make their applications less cluttered.

In recent years, web has been advanced in the way that developers can now implement websites that are so desktop-like in terms of user interaction thanks to new technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX. Google Docs, Yahoo Mail and Apple's MobileMe are good examples of rich web-based interfaces that let users do things that could not be imagined a few years earlier. Nobody could ever think of drag-&-drop in a web page, let alone hovering, resizing, etc.

However, there's one missing feature that bothers me occasionally. I recently have been working a lot with Google's Office suite and I found the lack of right-click and pop-up menus quite annoying. For example, in a typical application such as Excel, I simply pick a cell and right click to change its properties (such as its color, border style or format), but in a web-based spreadsheet platform (such as Google Apps) there's a drastically different approach. Since there's no pop-up menu option present, users have to click on a button on the toolbar to customize a cell. In a mail system (such as Yahoo), users cannot right click on an email and hit 'Delete'. They have to select it and click on the 'Delete' button that is embedded on top of the panel. Although this is not torturous to learn, being able to do right clicks and having access to a relevant menu could make more sense.

This is actually an issue caused by browsers' limitation. Web browsers are by themselves typical applications (just like any other application). They have pop-up menus that are triggered by users' right click actions, but they only contain browser-specific features (such as saving the photo or page, navigating back, downloading links, opening hyperlinks in a new window or tab, etc.). Eventually, there's no possible way to replace that menu with another pop-up menu to interact with the website by bypassing the browser functions. This gets even worse with websites designed by Flash technology as they have their own Adobe-powered pop-up menu.

I think web-based applications are still immature in terms of user interaction. They are advancing in general, but I still prefer to use desktop applications rather than their equivalent web-based versions. That's why I'm never interested to use Google Apps rather than Microsoft Office. I'm not sure whether web developers have ever noticed, but pop-up menus are really handy and user friendly. New web technologies such as HTML5 seem promising, but I'm in doubt if they are ever to be addressing such issue.