From the article: "When you think about it, click menus are actually what we expect already in most other contexts." [slapping my forehead] For more than a dec

From the article: "When you think about it, click menus are actually what we expect already in most other contexts." [slapping my forehead] For more than a decade I've been dumbfounded that nobody seemed to be thinking about something so obvious. I mean, the browser itself had well-functioning, standard menus. By the time CSS enabled web dropdown menus, the behavior of dropdown menus had been extensively tested in usability labs (all sorts of variations) and almost completely standardized across Windows, Mac, NeXT, BeOS, etc: Menus, consistent with all types of button, wait to be told to open which, also consistently, can be done by mouse, keyboard, touch, voice, eye-controller, etc. Then some web developer decided to create menus that didn't wait for you to ask. You'd click a link at some scroll position so you'd navigate to the new page with your mouse in some random position, which would then trigger some random menu to leap out and cover what you were looking for, forcing you to find a way to get off of it so it would close without accidentally triggering another menu and starting over. And if you finally saw what you wanted on some other part of the page and moved your mouse toward it: BLAT! Some other random menu was triggered en route. Or you have menus arranged so that trying to reach one keeps triggering another nearby that then covers it (looking at you, Amazon!) Then everyone else seems to have said, YES, I too want visitors to my page to feel as if they had just stumbled into a minefield. Instead of the extensively tested, usability-research-based standard menu behavior of clicking a menu or button when you want it, I want them to experience the thrill of not knowing what might happen and for it to happen differently depending on where they enter the page and whether they enter with a mouse or touch device. (Tooltips are okay if they are so small that they are very unlikely to cover anything you might need. You still have to set their delay long enough to not trigger at all when passed over.) We should be using the menu lessons that were well researched, well known, well liked, and well established back in Win95 days. We can pretend it's a newly invented concept called "click menus" if that helps.