Though it’s less common these days, many sites still use JavaScript or an HTML attribute to disable right-clicking on their pages. It’s a practice we hope goes away, but in the meantime, it’s not too hard to get around those restrictions.
Many of these sites seem under the impression that disabling the context menu in your browser is a good way to keep you from stealing their content. But disabling the context menu in your browser also deprives you of a lot of other tools. While you can take the nuclear option and just disable JavaScript in your browser, that limits the functionality of a lot of sites that use JavaScript to deliver useful features. Instead, we’re going to show you how you can re-enable right-clicking for specific pages you’re viewing, and a couple of extensions that limit these sites’ ability to impose the restriction in the first place.
Enable Right-Clicking on Individual Sites with a Bit of Your Own JavaScript
This first method is probably the least intrusive. It’s just a bit of JavaScript that resets the context menu value for a page. When viewing a page with right-click disabled, you can just type or paste this code into your address bar and hit Enter. You don’t even have to reload the page. Right-clicking should be enabled immediately.javascript:void(document.oncontextmenu=null);
Even better, you can create a bookmarklet out of that code so it’s always just one click away. Select the code above and drag it to your browser’s toolbar (or wherever you store bookmarks). Rename it something that makes sense to you, but leave the code intact for the URL.
Enable Right-Clicking and Copying on All Sites with a Browser Extension
While the JavaScript bookmarklet works well for re-enabling right-click on individual sites, you may want a more comprehensive solution if you find yourself running afoul of this problem more frequently. That solution is a browser extension.
In Chrome, we recommend installing the RightToCopy extension. As its name suggests, it does more than just enable right-clicking. It also enables text selection and copying on sites that have disabled those functions, and even removes text that web sites inject into the text you copy (such as “Read More at…”).
In Firefox, grab the RightToClick extension. Like the Chrome extension, RightToClick also enables text selection and copying. It also offers more configuration options than its Chrome counterpart, allowing you to control exactly what page functionality it affects. This helps ensure that you don’t remove any functionality you actually want.
And, of course, there are more comprehensive script blocking extensions available, such as NoScript (Firefox) and ScriptSafe (Chrome). Extensions like these block all scripts from running on any web pages unless you enable it. Both are worth looking into for a little added piece of mind, but note that they can be problematic on sites that use scripts for useful features.
And that’s it. Disabling right-clicking on web pages may be only an occasional problem, but it’s annoying when it happens. It’s also super easy to fix.