Context menu items

This user interface option adds one or more items to a browser context menu. This is the context menu available when a user right-clicks on a web page. Tabs can have context menus also, available through the browser.menus API.

Example of content menu items added by a WebExtension, from the context-menu-demo example

You would use this option to expose features that are relevant to specific browser or web page contexts. For example, you could show features to open a graphic editor when the user clicks on an image or offer a feature to save page content when part of a page is selected. You can add plain menu items, checkbox items, radio button groups, and separators to menus. Once a context menu item has been added using contextMenus.create it's displayed in all browser tabs, but you can hide it by removing it with contextMenus.remove.

The full list of supported contexts is available at menus.ContextType and includes contexts outside of a web page, such as bookmark items in the browser UI. For example, the "Open bookmark in Container Tab" extension adds a menu item that allows the user to open a bookmark URL in a new container tab:

A context menu with "open in new container tab" submenu highlighted. The submenu shows personal, work, banking, shopping, and Facebook contextual identities. There is an option at the top of the submenu to select no container.

Specifying context menu items

You manage context menu items programmatically, using the contextMenus API. However, you need to request the contextMenus permission in your manifest.json to be able to take advantage of the API.

json

"permissions": ["contextMenus"]

You can then add (and update or delete) the context menu items in your extension's background script. To create a menu item you specify an id, its title, and the context menus it should appear on:

js

browser.contextMenus.create(
  {
    id: "log-selection",
    title: browser.i18n.getMessage("contextMenuItemSelectionLogger"),
    contexts: ["selection"],
  },
  onCreated
);

Your extension then listens for clicks on the menu items. The passed information about the item clicked, the context where the click happened, and details of the tab where the click took place can then be used to invoke the appropriate extension functionality.

js

browser.contextMenus.onClicked.addListener((info, tab) => {
  switch (info.menuItemId) {
    case "log-selection":
      console.log(info.selectionText);
      break;
    // …
  }
});

Icons

For details on how to create icons to use with your context menu, see Iconography in the Acorn Design System documentation.

Examples

The webextensions-examples repository on GitHub contains two examples of extensions that implement context menu items: