contextmenu - 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:

• our UI designer wants to replace the browser's right-click context menu (showing our own menu where appropriate, or no menu at all) because he wants the web app to be more like our (existing) Windows app
• our developers (and I) strongly object because this is bad practice, and simply something you do not do in a web application

Thus, I'm looking for "more solid" arguments - like best practice guidelines, any statements from reputable sources, coding arguments etc. - for the pros and cons of this issue, which I can hopefully use to resolve it once and for all...

Answer 1

You can't do that reliably anyway. In Firefox, go to Settings, Contents, JavaScript/Advanced (I'm guessing the captions, no English Firefox (; ) to override context menu behaviour and bang, your app doesn't work anymore. My online-banking application did this in their old version, so I couldn't do copy & paste with the mouse. I hated it, so I enabled the protection in Firefox and it worked. Kind of. Their new version doesn't do such bad things anymore.

Instead, use a little drop-down arrow where a context menu is needed, that can either be clicked or just hovered over to show the menu. JetBrains' TeamCity web app does that very well.