GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 116890
Using BMiddle or BRight shouldn't select?
Last modified: 2013-02-11 05:13:15 UTC
From a Sun beta tester: "In GNOME, users can perform a select action using BLeft or one of the other pointing device buttons. For example, clicking BLeft, BMiddle (or the wheel), or BRight on a list item (e.g., in a list box, combo box, drop-down combo box) selects the item, and clicking BLeft, BMiddle (or the wheel), or BRight on a pull-down menu title opens the menu. A select action should be performed using only BLeft. Users have come to expect that BMiddle and BRight will have no effect if they inadvertently use these buttons while working in an application. If these buttons are active, the possibility of inadvertently choosing an incorrect action is increased, with the possibility of significant negative consequences in the kinds of mission-critical applications that I deal with. I would expect that other user communities would share these concerns."
So, what's your opinion, then?
Well, the only example of this that's caught me out personally (quite a few times!) is right-clicking on an Actions menu item, only to find out it activates the item rather than popping up another menu like the Applications menu does. That's arguably the fault of the Applications menu for giving me that expectation, but until that changes it's an expectation a lot of people seem to have. (And Windows users will come armed with it too, since they can right-click on Start menu items to do stuff). I think that's probably the main thing that has the potential to do actual damage... people right-clicking things to see if they have a context menu, only to find out they've clicked a button or something instead. The other instances do still have potential to contribute to a broken mental model though... e.g. "I can activate a scroll button or a spin button with button3 but not a combo box button, yet they all look pretty much the same".
* It would be useful to have a comprehensive places that need to be fixed. * In some cases, other button clicks have particular meaning - button3 on a spinbutton arrow or scrollbutton arrow means "go to the end", button 2 anywhere on a scrolllbar means "jump to position" (a particularly useful one.) These probably shouldn't be changed.
*** Bug 132924 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
No "comprehensive list of places" to restrict to left button has appeared yet.
I also think, that left, right and middle mouse button clicks should produce different behaviour in menu or other gtk+ widgets.
closing old bugs