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So exactly like right clicking on items to see if a contextual menu pops up in Windows 95?
by GeekyBear 7y ago
So exactly like right clicking on items to see if a contextual menu pops up in Windows 95?
- egeozcan 7y agoIt's easy to discover when there are only two buttons on your mouse. If it had one and pressing strongly did something else, you'd be right.
- stuartd 7y agoOriginally of course there was only one mouse button, and you would ctrl-click for the context menu
- ryanbrunner 7y agoTwo button mice were for sure the standard on non-Macintosh PCs well before Windows was in popular usage.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoAnd 3 wasn't rare, I think.
- kps 7y agoOriginally, yes, there was one¹. But three were used quite soon after.² ¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/350 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3... ² https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY
- GeekyBear 7y agoIt's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click. Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.
- egeozcan 7y agoUm, ease of use has little to do with discoverability. Two buttons are there in front of you.
- soylentgraham 7y agoOpening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on
- GeekyBear 7y agoForce touching an item to see if there is a contextual menu isn't a destructive action. That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.
- franga2000 7y agoBut if you "hard-press" a button that doesn't support hard-pressing, won't it just detect a normal press? Depending on what the button is, that might be destructive or at the very least time-consuming.
- GeekyBear 7y agoNewbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height. At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.
- gsich 7y agoYou still see a small bar even with "zero" height.
- daxelrod 7y agoYes. That was one of the worst parts of Windows 95’s interface because it wasn’t discoverable. A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.