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by lightedman 718 days ago
The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click.

This is by design.

3 comments

> The website you are visiting might be breaking it. There are many sites which will force that option to grey out upon right-click.

No, this is a new thing that happens on sites that weren't and aren't doing that. Also tab-switching fixes it.

I'm pretty sure that merely tab-switching hasn't fixed it for me. I've done both mouse and alt-tab, i've ctrl-w'd the tab and ctrl-shift-T'd it. I've opened the same site in a new tab and it still wouldn't work. I've had to completely shut the browser down. Maybe it's different between Windows and Linux, perhaps (I'm using Windows for this).

Maybe there's more than one cause, but the reason I hate this bug so much is because simple fixes like just alt-tabbing or even closing and re-opening or full-reload doesn't work. I'm like 99% certain that's the case. I'll have to verify next time this happens. It seems to happen at least a couple times a month.

Clicking the URL bar once always fixes it for me.
Many websites will also prevent highlighting text as well. Reader mode is helpful for that.
Or just hold down shift, at least in Firefox. This avoids sending the events to the javascript on the page so that the user can act on the page without being blocked, while still using a page’s own context menu if it really does provide a useful one (Google Docs, for example, has one with actual editing actions in it).
It's the duty and responsibility of a properly implemented browser to not allow a "website" to break basic UI functionality because it pushes some javascript. I don't care about how Safari and chrome and edge do it. Firefox should not follow their lead.

This is a fine example of why people install plugins like ublock origin and similar.

Firefox does it best here, because you can hold shift to get the original context menu back when the page blocks it or provides their own.
Exactly. There are legitimate use cases for hijacking the right-click menu to make it better. For example, Google docs, GMail, etc. The best solution IMHO is the shift key to get the normal menu. It's the best of both worlds.