FutureShop web site: If it looks like a native Aqua menu…

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh, Technology
September 19th, 2005 • 2:31 pm

It has to be seen to be believed. In Safari, you go to the Future Shop web site and you see a page that includes this:

Menu at FutureShop.ca

It looks like a native Aqua pop-up menu, right? So you click on it and hold your mouse button down… Nothing happens. No menu pops down. What’s going on?

Out of curiosity, you click on the menu again, but this time you don’t hold your mouse button down. And you get this:

Actual menu

How is this possible? A native Mac OS X Aqua pop-up menu control that actually requires that you click without holding, and causes a generic, ugly-looking cross-platform menu control to pop out when you do?

There is only one explanation for it: It might look like a native Aqua menu control, but it isn’t. It is actually a GIF image of a native Aqua pop-up menu control that some web designer at Future Shop captured in Mac OS X and then used as a static image on the company’s web site, associated with a generic JavaScript pop-up menu!

Could this be FutureShop’s way of telling us: “We are Mac-friendly!”…? If this web design hack is any indication, Future Shop’s idea of Mac-friendliness is purely a façade. And not a very pretty one at that.


2 Responses to “FutureShop web site: If it looks like a native Aqua menu…”

  1. Paul Ingraham says:

    I wonder if they saw your post and did something about it! I don’t get the same behaviour at all. The Aqua pop-up menus seem to actually be native Aqua pop-up menu… or they act exactly like them, anyway. Nothing fishy at all. Curious.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    We’re probably not talking about the same page. On the front section of the site, there are a couple of normally behaving Aqua menus. There are not the ones I was referring to. I guess I should have included a direct link to a page with the offending type of menu. Here is one. (Basically any product detail page will do. Try the pseudo Aqua menus at the top (“Shop by department” and “Featured Brands”).

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