Question for longtime Mac users:Did you used to have to HOLD the mouse to open menus?

[remain]

Like, you actually have to CLICK and HOLD the mouse button, or else the menu would disappear?

If so, when did this change?

 

[MacHeadCase]

It changed in OS X.

I remember you could get a haxie for the sticky-mouse thingy for the pre-OS X systems though. Just can't remember the name of said haxie right now.

 

[remain]

Really? It was only changed in OS X??

I've used the old Mac OS 4-5 times, and I never noticed that I needed to hold the button.

I didn't know the change was THAT recent.

 

[D3v1L80Y]

Really? It was only changed in OS X??

I've used the old Mac OS 4-5 times, and I never noticed that I needed to hold the button.

I didn't know the change was THAT recent.

Well, OS X has been out for almost 7 years. I would hardly call that recent.

It more or less went away with the introduction of "ctrl + click" in OS 9, which more or less replaced the click and hold function. You could still do the click and hold in OS 9, but ctrl+click just brought it up faster. You could also still use a two-button mouse with OS 9 (and even with certain apps and later versions of OS 8) and get the same effect. Macs still shipped with a one-button mouse, however.

For those who might be curious, and wondering why Macs only ever had a one-button mouse in the first place, it went like this:

+one click selected items
+double clicking opened items
+one click and drag moved items
+one click and hold brought up contextual menus

So, one button did everything that two buttons did. Macs only had one button because that is all it needed.

 

[Brown Study]

Firefox still lets you do that — though I could never make it work with my Logitech. Firefox's about:config has the setting

ui.click_hold_context_menus

that when set to true, purportedly allows left-click and hold. Everyone else seems to think it works.

 

[D3v1L80Y]

Yes, it does still work with some apps. Firefox is one of them. It is just the way that apps were programmed for Macs, and some of them still hold onto that, even though it really isn't needed anymore.
:black:

 

[remain]

Wait a second,
I was more specifically referring to the Menu Bar menus, not so much the context menus.

>_>

 

[MacHeadCase]

Yeah I guess the guys up there got sidetracked but it came only in Mac OS X.

 

[technologist]

Yes, before Mac OS 8, menu bar menus required you to click-and hold. (They were "pull down" menus, rather than "drop down" menus.)

That is, in System 7.5 and earlier, if you clicked on, say, the File menu, it would flash briefly and disappear. You had to click-and-hold to see the menu, and drag to make your selection. If you released the button, the menu would disappear.

With the introduction of "sticky" menus in Mac OS 8, menu behavior was changed so that you could click on a menu, and click again to make a selection. This was (and is) the same as the Windows behavior, and it made it a lot easier for Windows users to get used to a Mac.

Click-and-hold for contextual menus was a peculiarity of web browsers. It never worked in the Finder, or Word, or anything like that. It was largely an invention of Netscape, though IE and other browsers copied it on the Mac.

Netscape, at the time, was one of very few Mac applications that supported contextual menus, so it had to invent its own behavior since control-clicking was not established.