How to disable hijacking of middle click mouse event?
Today I went to this page: www.paypal.com/uk/smarthelp/contact-us and middle-clicked one of the links to open it in a new tab. However, it didn't open a new tab and instead took me to a new page!
I consider this outrageous! Websites should NOT be able to interfere with the user's controls like this!
How do I disable this in Firefox? I found a way to stop sites hijacking the right mouse button (context menu), but not the middle button.
I don't understand why Firefox ships with such things enabled. Who would want to allow websites to interfere with our basic controls? I mean what's next, is Firefox going to let websites limit where we can move the cursor? Or prevent us from pressing "Back"? This is getting quite sinister IMHO. Users are losing control of their computer. When I discovered that websites are now able to read and modify the clipboard I was outraged and immediately disabled these settings! There is absolutely no legitimate reason for such things to be allowed, it's just violating people's privacy and security.
Modified by MartyJames
All Replies (4)
That is a site issue not a browser issue. How they format the page determines what action the browser can do. So you should contact their Webmaster and request further help on that.
Contacting individual sites won't help. This is a security problem.
Sites shouldn't be able to interfere with mouse buttons. As far as I'm concerned, the only mouse click that websites should know about is the left click. Middle and right clicking is more of a private action and sites shouldn't be able to tell when I do that.
MartyJames said
Today I went to this page: www.paypal.com/uk/smarthelp/contact-us and middle-clicked one of the links to open it in a new tab.
It's not links, there's no <a> element, only <button>. Specification says that the webpage can be aware of mouse events, thus intercept it.
Modified by TyDraniu
In that case, the specification is stupid. Why allow a site to know if I'm middle-clicking. What could that possibly have to do with the site? You can't even middle or right click on a Mac, so no website should ever need middle or right-clicking to function.