To avoid confusion of having more than one button to click, they keep it to only one button. This reason is acceptable at some point. But then they created a zero button mice it’s very funny and silly because then (the beginner) people will be confused if they are asked to click the mouse button, “Which button? I don’t see any button”.

And then they support the area for right click, with no visible cue. This also can be confusing.
“Please click”. (And since it doesn’t seems to have more than one button, people will not be confused of which button/area to click, right? wrong!).
“OK, I clicked it, but nothing happened, only a small pop up menu appears”.
“Oh, no, you clicked it wrong, please click on the left area of the mouse, not on the right side of the mouse”.
“I didn’t know that, could I have different response if I click on the top side or bottom side?”.
Which could have been easier if from the beginning we have two buttons and we said “Click the left button”.

I like the Magic Mouse though, it is very easy to scroll (especially with momentum), and I hate Mighty Mouse, as it jammed a lot (I rather use third party mouse). If I have to improve the Magic mouse, I would give some visible marker (with different shape or color) underneath that shiny surface to show which one is left side and which one is right side. So I can say “click the left side” or “click on the
rectangle shape” or “click on the blue area”.
Idea to steal.

I only discovered a context menu in Wave because I only just started using it.

Thanks for setting me straight. There are context menus in Google Spreadsheets also.

I think the expectations argument goes the other way. It’s common and expected on the Mac and Windows, which is why it’s annoying when it’s not there in SaaS apps.

The reason context menus aren’t more prominent in webapps, so far as I can tell, is mainly one of expectation. You yourself just admitted only recently discovering a context menu in Wave. If an author is to put any important stuff in to a menu like that, they’ll either need to explain to every user how to use it, or duplicate the functions in left-clickable on screen objects. It’s a matter of user expectation, which is the same reason drag-and-drop based UI’s are having a hard time taking off on the web. There’s also the problem of it silently not working in older browsers, ones the author may be required to support. If you were running a commercial webapp would you really want the support burden of having several ways to do the same thing, some of which only work in recent browsers and silently don’t work at all in others?

I was surprised when I encountered it in Google Wave the other day.

So now my next question is: why is it not used more prominently in web apps?

And what about Flash. I don’t think I’ve seen a Flash app override the useless Flash plugin menu that appears on right click.

Anyone know?

Philip

• Webapps can’t make arbitrary chromeless windows, so the context menus they can create are always a part of the page, which means if you context-click near the edge of the window, often the menu revealed is actually clipped by the edge of the viewport, and inaccessible. It’s an implementation suckage really, but to fix it in a satisfying way nearly requires the use of a significantly different UI for the menu’s in order to indicate what they’re in relation to, without always having their corner aligned with it. A little arrow edge could do the trick there though!
• Anyone using a browser that’s a bit old won’t fire the event, so to support those users, the functionality needs to be duplicated in left-clickable UI anyway, which is why most web developers don’t bother.

There are some apps which support context clicking though if you’d like to see it in action. I often context-click in the web-ui for the Transmission bit-torrent client, and in the dropbox.com file browser interface. I think as we see the rise of rich web UI toolkits like Cappuccino, this UI metaphor will be refined for the web and become much more common place in things with the appearance of a ‘web app’.