For the past few months, Mozilla's content area context menus have been a bit of a mess. By `content areas' I mean the area in which the page is displayed in the browser; and the folder, thread, and message panes in mail/news. Many of the items in these menus have not been contextual, and the contextual and non-contextual items have been mixed together in a most delightfully confusing way. The inclusion of lots of global items has in turn led to another problem: some of the menus have many more items than any self-respecting menu (especially a context menu) should have. Indeed, there have been unconfirmed reports that in fine weather, the context menu for a hyperlinked IMG inside an IFRAME inside a FRAME inside an HTML document is marginally taller than the Empire State Building. I have a bug on finding a design to solve this problem <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75338>, and I've finally got around to doing the design. It is available for your perusal at <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=41581>. The main aim of this new design is to keep the menus short (the worst case is 13 items, as opposed to 26 items currently), and to make them ultra-consistent across contexts (right down to using the same accesskeys for the same commands). This way the context menus function as a primitive form of gestural navigation -- you can get the command you want with a quick drag of the mouse, hardly even having to read the menu itself. It would be great if Ben Goodger (on the browser side) and Jennifer Glick (on the mail/news side) could either give their approval to this design, or work together to find some other design which ensures maximum consistency across these two most commonly used of the Mozilla apps. >From others, I'd appreciate knowing about any errors or inconsistencies which remain -- I've checked through the design a few times, but I've probably missed the occasional accesskey clash or something. -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing <http://mozilla.org/>
