About

The RadialContext menu is a hierarchical, context-sensitive pie menu for Firefox and Mozilla. It offers an alternative to both the standard context menu and mouse gestures. The feeling is very similar to gestures. But there also is a GUI so you don't have to look up what options are available in the given context.

RadialContext-D is simply a continuation of the original RadialContext extension by Jens Tinz.

Jens has been unavailable since December 2005, so official development and bugfixing halted. dreadnaut has provided different "unofficial" versions for a while, now merged as this new RadialContext-D.

All credits for the idea and code go to Jens Tinz. I (dreadnaut) am merely fixing bugs, adding little features and ensuring compatibility with the newer versions of Firefox.

dreadnaut can be reached at dreadnaut@gmail.com, but you probably should not mail him about problems with this version.

Marien forked RadialContext-D to tweak it a bit more and ended up making a lot of (mostly minor) changes to the internals. Whether they actually make it work better remains to be seen :)

Reporting problems

If you find a problem not listed under "known problems" you should do at least one of the following things:

• Allow me to reproduce the problem. Tell me what website(s) and/or action(s) trigger it, and list other extensions or settings involved.
• Figure out how the code is failing (and if you can, tell me how to fix it! I love patches :)

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Extensions has some helpful information, mainly on the "Setting up extension development environment" page.

Installation

You can get the latest version of the original RadialContext at: www.radialthinking.de/radialcontext/ .

RadialContext-D is available from addons.mozilla.org and on my website at this address: http://dreadnaut.altervista.org/radialcontext/

RadialContext-mz is available from addons.mozilla.org.

Known problems

• Display of the menu is limited to the current frame.

• CSS and javascript from the displayed page can interfere with the menu.

  This should be rare, if you find a page triggering this please let me know.

  This problem and the previous one should go away if the menu is inserted into the browser chrome "document" instead of the content document. Unfortunately I could not get that to work right: the menu is no longer properly transparent. Browser chrome renders correctly, but page content shows up as window-background-gray (in Firefox 2 on GNU/Linux). In Firefox 3 beta 2 on Windows the content document is drawn on top of the menu (hiding it). I think this is bug 130078 or a bug related to it, and those bugs are marked as not completely fixed in Firefox 3 :(

• The "Bookmark" action is broken in Firefox 3.

  Will be fixed once I drop Firefox 2 compatibility.

• After closing the scroll menu the normal context menu sometimes pops up.

  I have no idea why this happens. If someone can figure out a consistent way to trigger this it will probably help with debugging.

• Interaction with pages responding to RadialContext's mouse button and/or the context menu is not perfect.

  RadialContext tries to either prevent such scripts from running or do as they "ask" depending on a pref setting, but this is not perfect even by a long shot and not heavily tested. Feedback (like urls of pages breaking it or broken by it) appreciated!

• Display doesn't work on top of plugins or MathML.

  Probably not fixable in the extension.

• Display does not work in an svg document (internal, not plugins)

  This might be fixable by reimplementing the menu in svg (svg on top of html works, but not the other way around). Might also be fixable in Firefox 3 with svg foreignObject stuff, but not a priority to me.

• The extension doesn't work properly under MacOS X because wrong mouse buttons get reported.

  I do not have access to MacOS X. Someone with MacOS X: please test and tell me what button values it does report. If you do not know how to do that: ask me.

• The scroll wheel does not work while the radial menu is open.

  This is a Mozilla misfeature: it apparently notices the mouse is over something that will not scroll. Tested with a radialcontext modified to let the mouse move outside the menu while it is open, and the scrollwheel started working as soon as it was outside the menu. There is nothing in radialcontext that could cause that.

  This seems to be fixed in Firefox 3.

TODO

Use sessionstore-windows-restored from http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Observer_Notifications to trigger the tip dialog (should also no longer need to be always on top that way).

Version history

Accuracy of dates varies wildly.

20.05.2008

Drop Firefox 3 support (use RadialContext-mz-1.1 instead). Unbreak Firefox 2 (Firefox 3 full page zoom support broke it).

18.04.2008

Hack around really weird bug where the prefdialog breaks when Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 is installed.

This should get fixed properly later, but debugging this is no fun at all (and I do not even know if the bug is in my code, Mozilla code or Adblock Plus code).

14.04.2008

Full page zoom is somewhat supported. The menu is zoomed along with the rest of the page (this differs from text zoom, which should not affect the menu at all), but should work ok.

04.03.2008

The tooltip is now always wide enough to fit the widest bold entry (it no longer has to resize when you move the mouse over a different item).

01.03.2008

Automagically adjust the autoscroll interval if the browser cannot keep up.

05.01.2008

Extra super smooth scrolling scrollmenu. Instead of having a fixed interval between scrolling a necessarily integer number of pixels both the number of pixels and the delay between scrolling them is now varied. This is noticable at slow scroll speeds.

01.01.2008

Minor fixes to work with Firefox 3 betas. Claim compatibility up to Firefox 3 beta 2. Fix typo mainly affecting open-on-drag mode.

20.09.2007

It responds to the "dom.event.contextmenu.enabled" pref now (the same one previously forced on). Needs testing.

20.09.2007

Menus are now fully customizable (replaces the "undo close tab"- specific hack).

31.08.2007

All "contexts" are now reachable instead of just the most important two. The secondary one is still in the bottom left of the toplevel menu, but moving to the top right from there now produces more contexts. Dragging down and left once and then up and right will now always (eventually) reach the scrolling menu. This is experimental, feedback on how well this works in practice is appreciated! Possible enhancement: bottom left for the first submenu, top right for the second, bottom left again for the third, etc. Not that hard to add but testing the current setup first.

25.08.2007

The "open link" and "save link" actions pass the right referrer.

25.08.2007

The width of the tooltip is now dynamic.

23.08.2007

Make the esc key close the menu.

21.08.2007

Add "force context menu on click" mode.

19.08.2007

Add "Show Radialcontext tips" item to the browser's help menu.

18.08.2007

Reworked preferences and tip dialog. Most changes not visible.

17.12.2006

(merged from radialcontext branch into radialcontext-d)

• force the setting "dom.event.contextmenu.enabled" to true
• reactivated code to avoid sabotating right-clicking in the sidebar
• explicitly unregister the prefs observer to fix a possible leak

14.12.2006

• repackaged as RadialContext-D and requires Firefox 2.0+
• added new Tab action: Undo Last Close

06.12.2006

• fixed a bug in the scroll sub-menu

22.11.2006

• fixed a compatibility issue with the Tab Mix Plus extension (later unfixed since TMP 3.5.2 solved the problem)

10.11.2006

• fixed a weird address bar behaviour due to some of my previous fixes :-p

01.11.2006

• fixed the "open in new window" bug

03.11.2005

• bumped maxVersion to 1.5
• fixed xpi package structure for Firefox 1.5
• fixed right menu showing together with the radial one, when using the right button

08.11.2004

• bumped maxVersion so Firefox 1.0 recognises the extension as compatible

22.10.2004

• menu works somewhat better across frames

08.10.2004

• fixed scrolling on Linux

08.08.2004

• fixed the drag to open option on windows

08.01.2004

• improved scrolling
• made sure that the startup tip window really appears only at startup
• internal changes to make the menu layout more flexible
• alt-functions can now have their own icons
• menu now displays above elements with a zIndex >= 100
• startup tip window now grows if necessary
• alt-clicking can no longer trigger a standard context menu

07.04.2004

• added an item to set the focus to the address bar
• fixed and improved the image blocking functionality

06.30.2004

• added 'close other tabs' and 'close other windows' functionality
• using opacity for rollover effects (which reduces the download size)
• highlighted (bold) labels now get slightly compressed to keep a constant length

06.27.2004

• made 'first page' / 'last page' functions accessible
• selections now get highlighted when a page source is shown
• opening a link in a new tab or window marks the link as visited
• bookmarking pages works again
• page validation is now offered as alt-functionality for page info

06.12.2004

• support for new extensions API of Firefox

05.02.2004

• worked over installer (should now properly support install in app chrome and user chrome)

03.14.2004

• menu gets suppressed on text input fields if used with left mouse button
• changed back the phase the RC functionality is added to the pages (change may have caused problems on Macs)
• slightly improved handling of text selections
• slightly improved CSS shielding

03/01/2004

• opening the menu on text selections, offers appropriate functionality in the top level menu
• updated tips at startup.

12/32/2003

• the extension now gets installed to the profile folder improved uninstall code

11/01/2003

• support for first page, last page and toggle sidebar

08/13/2003

• links in imagemaps are now recognized

08/03/2003

• label of selected item gets highlighted

unknown date

• saving images now uses uses cached version
• improved scrolling
• compensate text zoom
• forward and back items get grayed out appropriatly
• support for localisations
• access alt-functionality with mouse button
• fixed rendering on pages written right to left
• added reload frame functionality

1.0rc2

copy email address, tips at startup

1.0rc1

redesigned icons

1.0b4

navigation as secondary context, labels change for Alt

1.0b3

redesigned labels, 'open on drag' option, uninstall button

1.0b2

fixed 'unwanted selection' and other glitches improved configureability

1.0b1

menu can now stay open and new functionality for frames

1.0a4

improved functionality and configureability

1.0a3

replaced the toolbar with a prefs panel

1.0a2

fixed a stupid bug with images as links

1.0a1

initial public release