IOS – How to right-click in iOS Safari to access website specific functionality

iosipadsafariwebsites

More and more desktop websites these days use javascript to offer specific website functionality which is available when you right-click on something. Often the developers create something that looks like a menu, but could be anything.

If I'm browsing desktop websites on iOS Safari (mainly iPad, but sometimes iPhone), how do I perform a right-click to display this functionality?

For a simple example, visit https://swisnl.github.io/jQuery-contextMenu/demo.html and try to display the menu under the box which states "right click me". On a desktop it's pretty obvious, but I cannot work out how to trigger it on an iPhone or iPad.

I've tried tapping and holding but this either brings up the browser menu or the text selection tool. I've also tried double-tapping but that tends to zoom the page in and out.


Side note: If you do a Google search for this, you'll find many posts from people assuming that you want to right-click to access functionality that desktop browsers typically offer (such as back, forwards, reload, save as, view page source and inspect element). This is not the functionality I'm interested in accessing.

Best Answer

Since the original iPhone, mobile safari and iOS in general has multitouch and there is no concept of a single pointer. There can be up to 11 different point interactions that change in time, so the core problem is that web sites not designed for touch fail to deliver a good experience.

  1. There is no hover if you don’t have one pointer - so all the hover to show details falls flat
  2. There is no control / right shift / option / mofifier click to map to a pointer that doesn’t exist - so your use case simply fails to exist.

Some things do translate well:

  1. Mouse down event can be processed when multitouch shows a tap (finger down and no large movement)
  2. Mouse up event can be processed when multitouch shows a finger up (no more contact in the region of the initial touch or tracked moving touch)
  3. Multiple finger touch can sometimes map as option click.

Sorry to say there simply isn’t a mouse or pointer on iOS, but that’s kind of the summary.