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I'm hooked on the RadialContext extension. It provides a circular "radial menu" around your pointer when you right-click. If you hover for a moment, it explains what the menu options are, and some of them are expandable -- but, once you've used it for a while, it's almost like having gestures. Or rather, it's like having gestures from the beginning, but with training wheels...

It takes one button and expands it out (like flower petals) into multiple buttons.

You seem to have independently discovered or reinvented the pie menu, also known as the circle menu or radial context menu.

There are assorted demos here

Despite some evidence that pie menus are easier to use than more common schemes, they've never caught on. It might be because they are not as compact as other types and so page designers trade off some usability to make better use of screen space. Also, they don't scale well to a large number of options.

Still, you might think that with the human hand a a model of a radial selection device, pie menus would be more popular. However, even in the physical world, levers, switches, sliders and rows of buttons are more common than radial devices. The same objections for UI design on the screen seem to apply to physical devices.

There's a thingy for Windows that's the exact same thing I think (a port ?). It also lets you browse the filesystem apparently.

I only saw it once on someone's machine so I don't really know what it's called (and I don't use Windows myself). I recall it was a commercial app though (or shareware maybe).

The interface seemed comfortable enough though once that the user got used to it.

Anyway new interfaces are indeed *really* needed. Menus with submenus are really painful to use especially with crappy mice.

As far as I can tell, the only mildly successful "new" (it's not really new, more like 20 years old really but it only sort of caught on recently) interface is pie menus or their simplified child, mouse gestures.

Mozilla/Firefox users who haven't yet made the switch really should investigate the relevant extensions (Opera users have this available by default, otoh they can't customize it as much). My favorite being RadialContext found here http://www.radialthinking.de/radialcontext/.

Unfortunately pie menus don't scale when the number of items grows but I still believe that they could be used in more situations than just Web browsers (in image editing there certainly could be some things to do). Another drawback is that those don't work very well with the dreaded trackpads on laptops.

Anyway down with menus. Or multiple submenus at least.

For my presentations at university, I implemented my own HtmlPresenter this spring. If you're curious how a more basic implementation looks like, or want to use a more simple system, be welcome to use it.

I hereby put it into the public domain.

my favorite extension is RadialContext, basically gives you mouse gestures for Mozilla and Firefox.

The site for the radialcontext moved to radialthinking.de. You'll have to wait for a new version to be released that works with 0.9. Sorry. :-(

I like Radial Context, it works like gestures but is a menu with visual feedback, which is very useful when you don't know it inside out.

And Mozilla users can get an excellent pie menu extention here .

Browsing just doesnt feel right without it :)

I don't use Netscape, but I do use Mozilla 1.4b. It is my default browser. Why? I prefer the Mozilla mail client rather that any flavor of outlook. For the browser, it's more political than feature related. But I like the look of the modern them and I find it offer better customization. One of the killer feature of Mozilla that I appreciate the most is the RadialContext menu add-in.

The other nice thing is to be able to use the same application on many platform.