Overriding the right-click context menu in web browsers - pros and cons

Question

We are programming a web application (not \'just\' a web site, but functionality-wise a real application), and have the following discussion for the next release:

Answer 1

Replacing the browser right-click context menu for specific areas of your GUI from your web application can be quite useful. Doing this just to disable the context menu will annoy your users, who may try to find a way around it. Also, removing or replacing the browser right-click context menu from the entire area of your application will usually be annoying and can make it more difficult to debug.

Unfortunately, I cannot offer any more solid arguments, and I'm not exactly taking either side of the argument, but I thought I would share my experience both as a developer of a web application and as a web user.

Answer 2

If your application is to run in an intranet, maybe the UI designer arguments are valid: as long as all of the users of the application are well known and you want to emulate some Windows application, I think it's ok to restrict the right-click or any other input, because it's just the requirements of this application, as it would be to any other app.

But if your application is to run in the internet, disabling or replacing right-click is a very bad idea, and these are only some of the arguments I reminded of:

• First of all, changing the behavior of the user interface is aggressive and annoying -- no one wants to get used to "new controls" just to access your site, and generally people hate to leave their comfort area. I mean, I know what my right click does and I want it to do always the same thing.

• People can understand the difference between Windows apps and web apps, so there's no need to "emulate Windows app behavior".

• Not everyone uses Windows :-)

• Also, this is innefective, sice there are several ways to overwrite this behavior, such as settings in Firefox or even plugins that disable specific javascript instructions, such as this one.