Just a little comment. I’m usually not one to click on ads, but when I saw a banner ad for a NEC projector with 3000 ANSI lumens for under $1000 USD, I just had to take a look.
The NEC product page has a nice little sidebar to “Check out how NEC displays are being used by businesses”. Hoping that they might say something about displaying the output of an NMS, I decided to go for a look. Now, a little note about my browsing habits. I use Firefox, and have since it came out. I can’t use anything else - after all, I need my two dozen add-ons. Like any good Firefox user, I use tabs. At the moment, I have about a dozen open. Sometimes I have three times that (and I’ve never found problems with that. Try it in IE, I dare you). (Side note - I don’t understand how IE can still have market share, but not have an add-on facility like Firefox. Then again, they’re 3 years behind in almost all features…).
So, I unsuspectingly right-click on the link to “Learn More”, hoping for a nice right-click context menu. What do I get? A Flash menu. I Ctrl-click, and get the page I wanted - in the same window.
First of all, it’s not animated, there’s no reason why they need Flash to do what can be done with a simple image. Just another thing I hate about wed design - the use of “advanced” technologies (read: non-interoperable) when they’re not needed. But more importantly, respect your users’ browsing habits. The right-click menu has a purpose. And if your users want to open a link in a new tab/window, let them.
On the converse side of things, why doesn’t Macromedia get their act together and make flash into a technology that follows the functionality of the rest of the web? Surely right-clicking on a link wouldn’t be that hard to implement…
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