RightToClick lets you restore the right-click menu and fix other web page annoyances

Most web pages work just as you expect. You can browse them, left-click here, right-click there, and leave whenever you like -- which is just as it should be.

Other sites aren’t quite so straightforward, unfortunately. They might disable the right-click menu. Prevent you copying text. Maybe even try to stop you leaving a particular page. It’s annoying, but the Firefox add-on RightToClick does at least give you a very effective way to fight back.

At its simplest, RightToClick is extremely easy to use. If you’re at a site where this kind of restriction applies -- copy, paste, mouse clicks and other common actions just don’t work as usual -- then all you have to do is click RightToClick’s add-on bar icon. It will disable various JavaScript functionality, and the site should get back to normal immediately.

We say "should" because this won’t always be true. RightToClick isn’t analyzing a page in great depth, trying to spot the precise restriction and disable that alone; rather it’s turning off whole categories of JavaScript functions and hoping one of these will do the job. And it often will, too, but there’s also a chance that it will break some otherwise legitimate web pages.

You can try to reduce the chance of problems via RightToClick’s Options dialog, which allows you to choose exactly which areas of JavaScript you’d like to turn off. But while this sounds good in theory, it’s far from obvious how some of these options should be configured. Is it best to allow "event listeners", or disable them, for instance? Should you permit "page mouse-move CSS handlers", or block them? Are you sure?

This isn’t a fatal problem, though, and you shouldn’t let it put you off entirely. Leave RightToClick off until you need it, for instance, then turn it off again when you’re done, and you won’t have to worry about this at all.

And even if you don’t precisely understand the consequences of RightToClick’s various options, their names alone will often tell you enough. If you find you need to drag and drop some object on a page, but this isn’t working, say, it’s fairly obvious that clearing the "Disable page drag/drop handlers" will be a good place to start.

It may have the occasional undesirable side-effect, then, but on balance RightToClick is still a great way to get annoying web pages working more or less normally. Go try it out for yourself.

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