When I’m navigating around a good site I’ll often have several pages open at once, either as IE windows, or Firefox tabs. I’ll see a link and think “I need to read that when I’m done here, I’ll load it now”, right mouse click and get it going.
Sometimes people are trying to protect their images and page source by blocking the right mouse click. This really annoys me and usually I don’t proceed with the site. The owner has just lost all credibility.
Why that’s pathetic
- The main browser menu still works and will reveal the source
- You are only viewing the html and javascript – anything that is intellectual property should be contained in the serverside script
- Any javascript should be in a separate file, harder to get to but still accessible.
- If you’re trying to protect your images it’s too late, they’re already in my cache and I can retrieve them from there if I really, really want them, but copyright helps. If they’re not needed for a link then consider hiding their location by placing them as backgrounds in the CSS. Not foolproof but the casual image stealer will be stumped.
So if you’re tempted to throw some javascript like this on the page, please, please think again.
Good old A List Apart have an excellent article called Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention which deals with the major reason why people prevent right mouse clicks.
The other is javascript and I haven’t found an effective or practical way of protecting that yet.
Sarah
I visited Snowplanet last week and they had a photographer there and the shots go up on their website that evening.
The images were right click protected, but as with everything, you can always get to the source and from there to the image.
Now, I think that’s totally unnecessary.
Hi!
i was wondering if you have a right click blocker that was not related with java script on the web site that im trying to put the blocker in dosent allow javascript and i realy need one to pertect my html that i have made from people who wants to take my stuff! if you have any html that would help me that would be so great!!! And if not well thank you any way 🙂
Ang
Angie – did you read my post? You can’t protect HTML. It’s on the client machine. You can make it harder to read by using javascript, but only javascript (or VB script, but it’s pretty much the same thing) can do that job.
Where on earth are you hosting that you can’t have javascript?
Seems the folks at SitePoint agree: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/dont-disable-right-click