Control click for a contextual menu

Control click for a contextual menu
Mac Tip #274/31-Jan-2007

A friend recently mentioned problems with downloading things through her web browser. I suggested she try Control clicking (hold down the Control key while you click) on the link, so she could have more control over what happened.

This is the same as Right clicking on Windows.

When you Control click on something a contextual menu usually appears. It’s called contextual because it contains different items, depending on the context.

Call up a web page, for example, mactips.info, and hover over one of the links. Instead of clicking, hold down the Control key and click on the link. A contextual menu should appear.

What you see in that menu depends on which web browser you’re using and what extras you might have installed, but you should see choices such as Open Link in New Window, Open Link in New Tab, Download Linked File and the like.

Try Control clicking in your web browser and see what happens. Try it while over a link, ordinary text, an image, a movie, after clicking in a Search box, on the Forward, Back and other Toolbar buttons.

Also try another browser and see what happens there. In Safari, for example, Control clicking on a link to a web page offers the choice to Download Linked File, while in Opera I can either Save target as… or Save to download folder.

Control clicking isn’t restricted to web browsers, either. Try it in everything you do on your Mac; you may be surprised.