200556 - Contextual menu shouldn't appear during mousedown event on links that have an "onmousedown" event handler

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: DOM: Events, defect)

Description

[Richard Connamacher]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

http://www.indieimage.com/ has a CSS/DOM scroll functionality built into the
page that simulates scroll buttons using onmousedown events to start scrolling
and onmouseup or onmouseout events to stop scrolling. To see it, click on one of
the buttons to the left and a CSS layer appears containing information, inside a
box with scroll buttons on the bottom left corner. Scroll through it using the
buttons. (The Current Productions button is a good example.)

The contextual menu that appears on Macintosh computers by holding the mouse
down interferes with this, and the menu pops up when the mousedown event should
be going to the scroll button. The standard Macintosh way to get a popup menu on
a one-button mouse is to control-click, not hold the mouse down--the popup menus
appearing during mousedown are more of a non-standard convenience and shouldn't
pop up when clicking on a link with its own mousedown handler.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. go to http://www.indieimage.com/
2. click on "current productions"
3. use the scroll down control on the panel that pops up

Actual Results:  
A contextual menu appears over the control

Expected Results:  
Not shown the contextual menu since a link that has its own mousedown handler

Comment 1

[Alex Hirzel]

Reporter, I don't see any buttons on the left - might the page have changed? 
Either way, could you attempt to create a testcase of this behavior?  And since
this bug is fairly old, maybe try to reproduce in a nightly build?

Comment 2

[Richard Connamacher]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Reporter, I don't see any buttons on the left - might the page have changed? 
> Either way, could you attempt to create a testcase of this behavior?  And since
> this bug is fairly old, maybe try to reproduce in a nightly build?

The web site has changed. To see the test case for the bug, go to http://www.indieimage.com/
iieindex.html and follow the original directions - click on Current Productions and mousedown on 
the scroll down arrow in the popup box.

I have reproduced the bug using Mozilla 1.6, so it still exists.

Thanks for looking into it.

Comment 3

[Alex Hirzel]

Confirmed Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

Maybe instead of changing it outright, it could be a pref?  I'm sure there are
instances where having the context menu appear would be useful, though yes,
there are also instances where it is a nuisance.

Comment 4

[Richard Connamacher]

Maybe a pref could be made for it, though I would argue that the Mac system already has a 
standard mechanism for bringing up context menus, control-click. Also, Macs (Mac OS X, 
specifically, which is required for Mozilla 1.3 and later) has built-in support for three button mice, 
and many Mac users use them. Mozilla users tend to be power users, so I'd assume that most 
would know how to control-click. I'm not sure if holding the mouse down would be popular 
enough to justify a preference control.

(No other browser, including Apple's own browser, uses the hold-the-mouse-down option either. I 
hate to bring up the every-other-browser argument, but in this case it's a matter of user interface 
conventions.)

Comment 5

[:aceman]

I can see something similar. I have seen a page where they hooked
document.onmousedown (and -up and also window.onmousedown and -up) just to show
a window that says the context menu is disabled on this page. That works in IE -
displays that dialog once. In firefox 1.0, it shows that dialog 4 times AND also
shows the context menu once after the second dismissed dialog. Not allowing the
page to disable the context menu in the javascript preferences makes no difference.

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Neil, should this be still an issue on trunk? I think about bug 486990. If it is still valid a testcase would be nice since the original URL doesn't work anymore.

Comment 7

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Closing this as incomplete due to inactivity and the lack of a reproducible test case. Feel free to reopen the bug if there's a testcase that still reproduces the issue.