Monday 11 June 2007

Why doesn't web-based software make use of the right mouse button?

A brief investigation of why it's so rare to see web applications which make use of the right mouse button. Yes, there are lots of reasons not covered here, and numbers #1 to #3 are pretty obvious. Part of an occasional series on matters technological. It beats doing real work.

Reason #1: effort

Handling the right mouse button in web pages is a bit fiddly. Some developers don't know how to, or can't be bothered. It's lots more work than just putting in a hyperlink.

Reason #2a: transient user base

On the whole, people spend much more time using desktop application A than any web-based application B. There's a pretty small number of business-critical, use-it-every-minute-of-the-day web applications. Very few clock up even an hour of usage per user per week. In other words, very few web applications have any "power users".

The traditional problem in desktop software is how you advertise to the user that right-clicking is available.

This problem gets much harder when you're dealing with a web application which people only use occasionally, haven't been trained on, and want to be able to use "intuitively". You don't have time or receptiveness on your side to explain that right-clicking is available.

Reason #2b: not what users expect

And so there's a feedback effect. Developers don't put right-clicks into web-based software. Therefore, users don't expect them. Therefore, developers don't put them in.

Reason #3: blame Apple

Everyone demonstrates web-based applications running on Macs. Many (most?) Macs have single-button mice. Ctrl+click is a pain in the neck.

Reason #4: effort (part 2)

Firms which produce web-based software tend to have less formal documentation procedures than firms which produce desktop software. Documentation is not cool; it's not Web 2.0.

The alternative to providing a right-click (e.g. plus pop-up menu) will often be a whole extra configuration screen/dialog. This extra screen would need to documented and designed in advance, approved, coded, sent back for re-design when the uber-product manager doesn't like it, re-approved, re-coded, and probably needs all sorts of extra pages in the help file as well.

In other words: if your documentation procedures are strict, putting in a right-click is generally less hassle than the alternatives. So, desktop software tends towards having a minimal number of "busy" screens (whereas web applications tend towards lots of simple screens, for a number of other reasons including minimising/shaping bandwidth usage).