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Feedback on Context Menu Issues - Current design

Folks:

I've been using Dropbox since it was invite-only way back in the day. I love many things about this app. I went pro for a while when my needs required it, and have been free for a bit. Was considering going pro again as my needs are growing, but the biggest thing stopping me from wanting to give you money is your anti-user design.

Some context: I'm a power user. I keep a manicured classic start menu so I can keyboard shortcut to anything on my computer. I curate my context menus to work for me and not have clutter.

The problem: Every year, you make it harder to customize our user interface in Windows Explorer and our Start Menu. Once upon a time, I could just Move, Rename, or Remove start menu entries I didn't want after installation. You changed it so that the update process reinstalls any I've changed. I can't even hide them, because you overwrite that too. Fine, I made a script that I run after every update now to clean up that garbage. But you shouldn't be forcing this. If you really feel like you have to to help your completely unexpert users, then let us toggle it with a setting or disable it with a registry entry.

But even more insane is the context menu. Every good app I use lets me choose whether to add it to the context menu. Most of them only have one entry anyways, or (like WinRar) put them in a submenu item. What you do is force *six* context menu entries, with no way to disable them, and not under a submenu in the menu.

Now, back in the day, I dealt wih it the same way. There were various registry edits we could use to clean this up, and I built a script to do it after install. You put them back after every update? I ran the script after every install. But a little while back, you broke that so that even rooting out your registry entries doesn't stop it. Fine, I manually clean them out with ShellExView.

And now that doesn't even work. Despite disabling the context menu items there, they're persisting. I can no longer reclaim my context menu for my own. None of the known workarounds work. And you refuse to offer any option to turn that **bleep** off.

Now let me explain exactly how stupid and annoying that is. You're taking up 1/3 of my context menu. You hijack the "D" keyboard shortcut in the context menu so I can no longer right click and hit my D key to delete an item. Because now that jumps to "View on Dropbox.com" which I literally *NEVER* want to do.

I can't right click an item and "create a shortcut" by using the S key because you've hijacked that to "Share with dropbox" dialogue.

The minor issue with this is that you've implemented your context menu badly by overriding default Windows behaviors because you didn't specify currently-unused keys and that you didn't put them in a submenu item.

The MAJOR issue with this is that your anti-user behavior of refusing to allow us to customize these items like every good app does AND your intentional breaking of every workaround that users come up with to circumvent your dark pattern design.

This goes from "bad choices" to "malevolent choices".

Stop trying to take over my explorer window. Let me customize what goes in my own context menu. And when we find workarounds to fix your shoddy design, don't make it worse by intentionally breaking the fixes.

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Comments

Hannah

Hey @PRFS, thanks for taking the time to post to the Dropbox Community.

We really do appreciate your comments on this and rest assured that your feedback will be passed along to our team.

One thing I can think of is to try these steps and to see if you can perhaps try to just move the items down on the list, so they're not in the top 15, instead of deleting them.

Thanks for the feedback, and for sharing how this is affecting your workflow, nonetheless.

Rich

@Hannah wrote:
One thing I can think of is to try these steps and to see if you can perhaps try to just move the items down on the list, so they're not in the top 15, instead of deleting them.

Those steps refer to moving the overlay icon registry entries down the list to prevent them from overwriting other icon overlays. The steps aren't referring to the context menu entries that you get from right-clicking a file or folder.

PRFS

This isn't an issue with Synch icons, it's an issue with the context menu.

rlb35680

Windows 11 and a long-time Dropbox user here: I seem to have to hack the registry to remove unwanted Dropbox items from the right-click context menu after every Windows and/or Dropbox update. The worst offenders are always located at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PackagedCom\Package. They're "worst" because you can't create a .reg file to get rid of them; you have to do it manually. (The "shelex" keys can be killed with a simple .reg file whenever they return.) Dropbox should NOT add anything to the Context Menu without asking me if I want it to. And once I tell it NOT TO, it should never ask me again.

Hillaero

One way to fix this is to remap droopbox folder using subst. This will remap the dropbox folder to a drive letter.

SUBST M: E:\Dropbox

Now just ditch the default dropbox environment and work off this new entry point. This will block the dynamic context menu because the dropbox background application will not know you are right clicking on a dropbox file. In addition, this will remove the right click lag that is caused by these dynamic menu items.

You will still need to remove the standard registry entries for the non-dynamic context entries.

If you want this remapping to persist over reboot you can add the following registry key

- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices\
- create new string value
- set the name to M:
- set the data to \??\E:\Dropbox

Did I mention I love dropbox...