by reid on 5/25/21, 6:57 AM with 294 comments
by jaas on 5/25/21, 12:59 PM
It has nothing to do with engineering resources, and we always wanted native context menus, but they were not customizable enough to meet the perceived needs of web, XUL, and extension developers at the time. People expected to be able to change colors and layout with CSS, for example. The native APIs put heavy limitations on what you could do with a native context menu and it was just not compatible with the expectations of people building against the rendering engine at the time.
There was some discussion of switching back and forth between native and non-native menus based on styling, but that got complicated quickly and it wasn't thought to be worthwhile.
It sounds like perceived needs have changed, and maybe the native APIs allow for bit more flexibility now. Glad it's happening, excited to see how well it works!
by dijit on 5/25/21, 7:48 AM
It's nice to see the inverse of that, I doubt anyone would have replied every 90 days for 21 years.
by satysin on 5/25/21, 9:10 AM
As silly as it sounds this might just be enough to get me to use Firefox as my main browser on macOS. I have played around with Nightly recently and love the new UI design. Can't wait for this to hit release.
by mtlynch on 5/25/21, 12:00 PM
>Blake Ross
>Comment 5 • 21 years ago
>How easy/hard would this be?
Blake Ross[0] was 15 years old at the time of that comment. It was two years before he, Dave Hyatt, and Joe Hewitt published the first version of Firefox.
by mhd on 5/25/21, 8:55 AM
by qalmakka on 5/25/21, 7:30 AM
by slver on 5/25/21, 7:34 AM
"I can't argue, but it's a time thing."
21 years later...
"Fixed."
by abdusco on 5/25/21, 8:26 AM
As a recent Mac user, I don't know if this is a mac thing, but I hate not being able to use the keyboard to navigate around the UI. Although the trackpad is nice, it can't beat the precision of the keyboard. I can't focus the menu bar, trigger a context menu with the keyboard, tab around panels and buttons. It's an accessibility nightmare.
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/image...
by nyx on 5/25/21, 7:30 AM
by jez on 5/25/21, 8:13 AM
It's such a convenient way to learn new words (and even works across multiple languages). Alas. Maybe in a future update!
(Another, similar, gripe is that both Safari and Chrome, along with most other native macOS apps, will select the word under the cursor with just a right click—no need to even double click to select first and then right click. Firefox doesn't do that.)
by wodenokoto on 5/25/21, 7:44 AM
I know you can force-click on laptops, but, not everyone is on a laptop all the time, and force-clicking doesn't allow you to choose the selection, which can be quite problematic for languages that doesn't use spaces.
by fuzzy2 on 5/25/21, 8:05 AM
by larrysalibra on 5/25/21, 7:27 AM
by was_a_dev on 5/25/21, 9:46 AM
by pjc50 on 5/25/21, 8:14 AM
It's kind of nice to see that they will, eventually, get round to issues like this.
by beltsazar on 5/25/21, 10:26 AM
When I read a webpage, I often select some words (technical terms, movie names, etc), right-click, and press "S" in the keyboard for quickly googling the words. I tried it in Firefox Developer Edition (equivalent to Firefox Beta) which already has native context menus, and it didn't work.
Can't believe this happens to me: https://xkcd.com/1172/
by thih9 on 5/25/21, 1:33 PM
Also, this is especially useful for people using dark mode, since native context menus match that setting.
by singhkays on 5/25/21, 7:51 AM
You have to share your entire screen to show someone all the available options in the context/drop-down menu.
by jenshk on 5/25/21, 8:14 AM
by pwdisswordfish8 on 5/25/21, 11:41 AM
I mean, compare it to this bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807
First the response was ‘just use an extension’. I did that happily, until the extension API was neutered, making the extension non-functional. When people brought that up, Mozilla closed comments on the bug report. Now it is closed as WONTFIX with this laughable excuse:
> Extension APIs (which I know aren't yet available) would be the solution for implementing this if there is enough demand.
Meanwhile, Chromium had this from day one. It works a bit differently now, but it’s still there, I just checked. Doable? Perfectly doable.
by fen4o on 5/25/21, 7:27 AM
by tobiasu on 5/25/21, 9:58 AM
Have they removed it all? I can find old stuff in the archived github repo, but that's about it. What's the official entry point?
by millerm on 5/25/21, 12:25 PM
by xfz on 5/25/21, 11:05 AM
by mariusmarais on 5/25/21, 10:22 AM
Edit: Bumped from P3 -> P1 3 months ago :)
by megamix on 5/25/21, 8:24 AM
by sbahr001 on 5/25/21, 5:52 PM
by marban on 5/25/21, 8:07 AM
by DonHopkins on 5/25/21, 12:39 PM
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/windo...
Is there a way with that (or any other) API to pop up and precisely measure and position an arbitrarily shaped (alpha channeled) window, without any other chrome or window frames? And then globally capture and track mouse and keyboard events?
Does anyone know if there's now a way for a browser extension to do that in any browser? Or would it require hacking platform specific C++ operating system code?
Here's a demo of an ancient implementation of pie menus I made for ActiveX around 1997, that shows pie menus with arbitrarily shaped windows:
ActiveX Pie Menus: Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control, developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag
ActiveX Pie Menus doc, examples, sources, etc:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieM...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/PieMenuDesc...
I did all the drawing with Win32 calls, so you could configure the fonts and colors and sizes and window shapes and styles, but you couldn't style everything arbitrarily with css, embed arbitrary web content, or anything nice like that.
At the end of the demo video, I concluded that:
>I ran up into a wall of complexity with this ActiveX control, in that I wanted to be able to have as the menu items animated gifs, mpeg movies, fonts with nice attributes, and things like that.
>So the first thought was "well let's just put a whole web browser in every item!"
>But that was a little heavy-handed. So instead, I put the pie menus into the web browser as a Dynamic HTML Component. Which I'll show next.
Of course it makes a lot more sense to draw and style the pie menus with the browser's renderer, but I still want the best of both worlds, where I can pop browser-drawn pie menus in arbitrarily shaped and positioned operating system windows, and track the mouse globally (capturing the mouse and keyboard events and receiving mouse motion and up and key events outside the window, to pop up and track sub-menus properly).
JavaScript Pie Menus: Pie menus for JavaScript on Internet Explorer version 5, configured in XML, rendered with dynamic HTML, by Don Hopkins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5k4gJK-aWw&ab_channel=DonHo...
by kome on 5/25/21, 9:42 AM
I wish I could donate just to fix this bug for everybody.
by modeitsch on 5/25/21, 8:11 AM
