The contextmenu event fires when the user attempts to open a context menu. This event is typically triggered by clicking the right mouse button, or by pressing the context menu key.
In the latter case, the context menu is displayed at the bottom left of the focused element, unless the element is a tree, in which case the context menu is displayed at the bottom left of the current row.
Any right-click event that is not disabled (by calling the click event's preventDefault() method) will result in a contextmenu event being fired at the targeted element.
Note: An exception to this in Firefox: if the user holds down the Shift key while right-clicking, then the context menu will be shown without a contextmenu event being fired.
Syntax
Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.
Note: In earlier versions of the specification the event type for this event was a MouseEvent, and this is still the type passed in Firefox and Safari.
Event properties
This interface also inherits properties of its parents, UIEvent and Event.
The type of device that generated the event (one of the MOZ_SOURCE_* constants). This lets you, for example, determine whether a mouse event was generated by an actual mouse or by a touch event (which might affect the degree of accuracy with which you interpret the coordinates associated with the event).
The normalized pressure of the pointer input in the range 0 to 1, where 0 and 1 represent the minimum and maximum pressure the hardware is capable of detecting, respectively.
The normalized tangential pressure of the pointer input (also known as barrel pressure or cylinder stress) in the range -1 to 1, where 0 is the neutral position of the control.
The plane angle (in degrees, in the range of -90 to 90) between the Y–Z plane and the plane containing both the pointer (e.g. pen stylus) axis and the Y axis.
The plane angle (in degrees, in the range of -90 to 90) between the X–Z plane and the plane containing both the pointer (e.g. pen stylus) axis and the X axis.
Indicates if the pointer represents the primary pointer of this pointer type.
Examples
Canceling the contextmenu event
In this example, the default action of the contextmenu event is canceled using preventDefault() when the contextmenu event is fired at the first paragraph. As a result, the first paragraph will do nothing when right-clicked, while the second paragraph will show the standard context menu offered by your browser.
Note: In Firefox, if you hold down the Shift key while right-clicking, then the context menu is shown without the contextmenu event being fired. Therefore, canceling the event does not stop the context menu from being shown.
HTML
html
<pid="noContextMenu">The context menu has been disabled on this paragraph.</p><p>But it has not been disabled on this one.</p>