2005 - 1,315 views, 3 Comments

Summary: The conspiracy theorists are out in force, this time accusing Microsoft's MSN of intentionally disabling the right click function in FireFox, while not doing the same for Internet Explorer (IE). Now,mind you, just because Microsoft engenders its share of conspiracy theorists doesn't ...

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The conspiracy theorists are out in force, this time accusing Microsoft’s MSN of intentionally disabling the right click function in FireFox, while not doing the same for Internet Explorer (IE). Now,mind you, just because Microsoft engenders its share of conspiracy theorists doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you. However, as Aunty often says, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ineptitude or even garden variety oversight. For one thing, the former requires far more cunning than the latter.

At issue is the discovery that the ability to right-click on an embedded link on the MSN homepage, allowing one to open the link in a new window rather than going directly to the target, has been disabled, or at least broken, in FireFix, while it still works in IE.

This is the unwitting, or dastardly, depending on in which camp you fall, work of the javascript called by the MSN homepage, and residing at http://hp.msn.com/scr/home/msnmoz1021.js.

According to Aunty’s sources, this sort of result from this sort of script is not at all uncommon, and indeed is more likely the result of no forethought, rather than malice of same.

In any event, if you run into this, you can work around it by, among other things, disabling javascript in FireFox, or using your adblocking software to block http://hp.msn.com/scr/home/msnmoz1021.js, or, for some systems, holding down control while doing your right clicking.

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3 Comments »

I’ve noticed a similar issue reading Hotmail with Firefox. Right-clicking a link in a message in Hotmail does not give the option of opening in a new tab (part of why I prefer Opera and Firefox), only allowing a new window.

I suspect that one can apply Hanlon’s Razor anytime you’re talking about M$.

Comment by Timmer — 6/30/2005 @ 7:37 am
I just checked MSN & Hotmail with FF 1.04 & have no issues with right clicking a link so I don’t know what all the fuss is about….

Comment by Jeffrey Tindillier — 6/30/2005 @ 8:57 am
I don’t have the problem of right clicks being blocked in Firefox. I have added the extension “Allow Right-Click” ver 0.1.1, which can be found at, “http://extensions.roachfiend.com/”. This saves a lot of aggrivation.

Comment by David Sisson — 7/11/2005 @ 5:28 pm

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