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Microsoft blocks right clicking on MSN for Mozilla browsers

8 Comments
 Published June 28th, 2005 3:29 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman

Microsoft has blocked the right clicking of links on the MSN web site when using the Mozilla web browsers.

Left clicking on a link, opens the page in the same tab.

It seems as though Microsoft is specifically looking out for Mozilla browsers. Take a look at the JavaScript that’s causing it.

This is an attempt by Microsoft to stop people from using alternative browsers.

This does not affect the Opera browser, yet.

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8 Comments

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  1. 1 Anonymous Jun 28th, 2005 at 4:37 pm

    Why can’t we all just get along?

  2. 2 Jeena Paradies Jun 28th, 2005 at 8:43 pm

    > This does not affect the Opera browser, yet.

    I could be because Opera rapairs Microsoft pages.

  3. 3 Daniel Goldman Jun 28th, 2005 at 8:48 pm

    Jeena,

    MSDN is not the same thing as MSN.

  4. 4 minghong Jun 28th, 2005 at 9:14 pm

    Block right-click? Kidding. No problem for me. Using Deer Park Alpha 1.

    In Firefox, there is an option to disallow blocking of right-click. While I can’t find that option in Deer Park, but it just works! ;-) I didn’t have Firefox profile before installing Deer Park. Probably the default value was set to disabled.

  5. 5 Daniel Goldman Jun 28th, 2005 at 9:17 pm

    In Firefox, there is an option to disallow blocking of right-click.

    I believe Opera doesn’t even allow sites to disable the right-click.

  6. 6 Leons Petrazickis Jun 28th, 2005 at 11:29 pm

    Opera disables right-click capture by default, but allows the user to enable it manually if they really, really need their right-clicks to be sent to Javascript.

    Preferences > Content > Javascript Options

  7. 7 Anonymous Jun 29th, 2005 at 3:04 am

    From the first link in the original post:

    Update: It has since been revealed by the gentleman apparently responsible for the MSN script causing the problem that it is an unintended effect and could possibly be a bug in Firefox 1.0.4. I should note that I did not state it WAS an intentional effort to block alternative browsers, I simply implied it might be. I believe that that is a reasonable theory in light of the fact that such things have happened at MSN before.

    http://htmlfixit.com/?p=727#comment-272

  8. 8 minghong Jun 29th, 2005 at 11:34 am

    Correction: it works in Deer Park. Try right-clicking at hyperlinks. The browser follows the hyperlink instead of showing a context menu.

    M$ sucks.

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