How do I right-click in iOS Safari to access website specific functionality?

Question

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.

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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.

Answer 1

Since the original iPhone, mobile safari and iOS in general has multitouch and there is no concept of a cursor. The iOS idiom is direct manipulation of objects and not to have a floating object that exists to move content up when you drag something else down in the case of a scroll bar and thumb. The multitasking idiot is also shattered on iOS / iPadOS which also weakens the need for a cursor and window managers.

Recent iOS and iPad OS do have all the cursor control you expect. Use a Magic Keyboard, Bluetooth trackpad, Bluetooth mouse or USB device and you get your cursor that meets your right click needs.

For most people, the initial concept of multitouch on the original iPhone explicitly chose to eliminate entirely the concept of a cursor: for which many people still will not forgive Apple. Macintosh was all about cursors, mice and contextual menus despite sticking to one button mice (for which many will never “forgive Apple” either.)

Without a pointing device, the OS still uses multitouch to forego “right click” emulation and instead recognize other gestures that use the up to 11 different point interactions that track surface area change in time as well as two-dimensional motion.

The core problem is that web sites not designed for touch fail to deliver a good experience. Whether we blame Apple for this or the web developers for this or the groups that design software tools for this is open to debate amongst even good intentioned professionals.

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. I’m not saying anyone here is wrong, just explaining what happened and that there may be two or more sides with differing goals that can yield to really bad implementations of a web design.