[HN Gopher] Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
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Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
Author : mmsc
Score : 217 points
Date : 2026-03-04 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joshua.hu)
(TXT) w3m dump (joshua.hu)
| wvenable wrote:
| > Why do all of the above have ...? No clue.
|
| The "..." convention is used when menu options open a dialog box
| rather than just immediately doing the action.
| paulddraper wrote:
| +1 This has been true for, what, 30 years?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| At least 40 years, since it was already present in Windows
| 1.0 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-SuAaYDZIk for an
| example).
| marssaxman wrote:
| The original Macintosh software also did this, back in
| 1984.
|
| From the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, published in
| 1986: "The application dims an item when the user can't
| choose it. If the user moves the pointer over a dimmed
| item, that item isn't highlighted."
|
| There may well have been prior art, but that's as far back
| as my knowledge goes.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Specifically, it means that more information is required to
| complete the task (e.g. requesting the filename for saving a
| file). If the action is literally about opening that dialog
| (e.g. something like "Show Properties"), the ellipsis is not
| needed.
| layer8 wrote:
| The practical use is that the user knows they will still have
| the opportunity to back out of the operation, and not commit
| to it by the first click. I don't think "will need more
| input" is that useful as an information by itself.
| ndespres wrote:
| Some of these complaints feel like they aren't specific to
| Firefox at all, but are UI conventions that used to be
| ubiquitous and no longer are, much to the chagrin of those of
| us of a certain age.
|
| He also rails against menu items that are greyed out and
| unusable, where to me that's a very useful indicator that the
| action isn't available here but that I'm looking in the right
| place.
|
| When I want to click a menu item and find it greyed out, that
| tells me something. But when I want to click a menu item and
| it's not there at all, I'm confused. Did a developer move it
| somewhere else? Did the name of the action change? Am I losing
| my touch?
| vanschelven wrote:
| Indeed both the "..." and "disabling over removing" were in
| the windows 95 UI manual
| jrmg wrote:
| Also macOS in its various guises, for decades.
| quesera wrote:
| They were original in the 1984 Macintosh OS (before it had
| a name), and published in the first edition (1987) of the
| Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
|
| Just two of the things Microsoft copied successfully. :)
| pdntspa wrote:
| I have a lot of questions about the person who wrote that
| blog post, in that it seems to be a quick hot take without
| any digging into the reasons why things are the way are
|
| Blog first, ask questions later? It's like c'mon man, have at
| least a little bit of curiosity...
| darkwater wrote:
| No idea about author's exact age but I would bet he was
| born around Y2K (according to his CV) and, well, it's IMO a
| testament that usability is based on habits, culture and
| conventions, and it's not a universal truth.
| kps wrote:
| _Intuitive equals familar_ -- Jef Raskin
| https://doi.org/10.1145/182987.584629
| wk_end wrote:
| "The only intuitive user interface is the nipple."
|
| (usually attributed to Bruce Tognazzini)
| lucianbr wrote:
| This particular line serves only to highlight the author's
| limited knowledge. I wonder what they meant by it.
|
| Also greyed out options have a point, they only seem "fucking
| useless" if you don't know it.
| mmsc wrote:
| You're right, I didn't know about what that "..." meant. It's
| kind of obvious what I meant though: "I don't know why all of
| these have ..." I've added that information to the post.
|
| The greyed out options have no point because 99.99% of the
| links I click are already clean. Like so many of the other
| privacy enhancing options, just provide an option to "clean
| links automatically."
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Link "cleaning" will sometimes just break a link entirely
| since it's a heuristic-based thing that removes query
| parameters that appear to be nonfunctional tracking
| parameters. Doing it by default would be setting up users
| for the occasional very bad experience.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The article's author doesn't appear to be particularly tech-
| literate. I flagged the post on the grounds that it doesn't
| meet HN standards in general.
| varun_ch wrote:
| It is fantastic that Firefox gives us the benefit of choice
| though. Maybe Chrome or whatever has better UX taste out of the
| box, but good luck changing anything if you disagree.
|
| I wrote a blog post about how I customized Firefox exactly to
| what I wanted https://varun.ch/posts/firefox/ including a minimal
| UI, monospaced font, sidebar, etc etc. userChrome.css is a great
| feature and it's amazing that it's just exposed to the user.
| bigthymer wrote:
| Personally, I think the Firefox browser right-click options are
| one of the more useful right-click menus. The one on the Apple OS
| is a better example of excessive and worthless.
| peterspath wrote:
| I really miss the look up, translate, and search with...
| options in Firefox I have anywhere else when I right click on a
| selected word.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| interestingly, I have these options in Firefox
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I think the above comment meant that he misses those
| Firefox options when he uses other applications.
| aftbit wrote:
| Odd complaint but interesting list of about:config options! I
| must be in the tiny minority that has actually _used_ all of
| these right-click menu items at one time or another.
| yreg wrote:
| I mean "Set as Desktop background" seems to definitely be an
| overkill to have on a speed dial.
|
| Unfortunately that one is not removable through about:config.
| debugnik wrote:
| That one gets used a lot when someone leaves their laptop
| unlocked at college.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| That one's been there since the very early days of Netscape
| Navigator. It's been a few decades since I last clicked on
| it, but that's mostly because I haven't set my desktop
| wallpaper in a few decades and I suspect using that isn't too
| rare for the people who do set wallpaper?
| dwoldrich wrote:
| Apple famously abandoned per-window menus per Fitt's law[1].
| Wiki[2] says:
|
| > Apple experiments in GUI design for the Lisa project initially
| used multiple menu bars anchored to the bottom of windows, but
| this was quickly dropped in favor of the current arrangement, as
| it proved slower to use (in accordance with Fitts's law). The
| idea of separate menus in each window or document was later
| implemented in Windows and is the default approach in most Linux
| desktop environments.
|
| I recall hearing a quote that said Jobs called the menu the
| ultimate discoverability tool in the designer's arsenal, but I
| couldn't find the quote.
|
| I am thankful for the menu junk drawer in Firefox. Better to give
| me everything I can discover in a menu rather than make a zillion
| fugly buttons and cluttering up the chrome. Although, anything
| that isn't frequently used by users should at least go under a
| few submenus to echo OP's criticisms. If Copy Clean Link is the
| "right" thing to do for users, then make "Copy Raw Link" a sub-
| menu item.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_bar
| layer8 wrote:
| Fitts's law for menu bars made sense on a 12" monitor back
| then, but not so much on today's large displays.
| dwoldrich wrote:
| Maybe worthwhile to encourage a heavier reliance on right
| click menus going forward, then? Seems to make sense in a
| future VR world.
|
| I have noticed that Mac Sequoia I'm running now has some
| memory as to which process last focused on each display and
| now is able to show a different menu per display, albeit
| grayed for displays where the user is not currently focused.
| It's a little janky, but kindof a graceful devolution of the
| original single menu vision.
| layer8 wrote:
| Context menus are specifically for actions on the
| particular thing you click on (for example a file in a file
| listing, or an object in a layout program). It still makes
| sense to have a separate application menu bar. But
| personally I think menu bars are really more intuitive
| attached to the application window rather than at the top
| of the screen, potentially relatively far away from the
| window.
|
| With today's wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the side
| would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at the
| top, though, similar to vertical tabs.
|
| I don't see a future VR world other than for casual use,
| because keyboard and mouse/trackpad will remain the
| highest-bandwidth way to interact with a computer.
| kps wrote:
| > With today's wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the
| side would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at
| the top, though, similar to vertical tabs.
|
| That's what NeXTSTEP did for application menus, along
| with right-click context menus (which MacOS X did keep).
| wtallis wrote:
| > With today's wide screens, a vertical menu bar at the
| side would perhaps make more sense than the usual one at
| the top, though, similar to vertical tabs.
|
| Yes, please. Bring back the NeXTSTEP menus for desktops!
| But on laptops, it's still pretty common for almost all
| windows to be full screen most of the time, so having the
| menu bar at the top of the screen is still the best
| choice for that environment.
|
| That gap between what's best on a laptop and what's best
| on a desktop with large or multiple displays has been
| growing since desktop displays broke free of the 1080p
| but they were stuck in. But I don't think it's anywhere
| close to wide enough that Apple or Microsoft would be
| willing to implement different UI paradigms. It's hard
| enough getting them to understand that tablets and
| laptops need different UIs.
| dwoldrich wrote:
| That's a good point about context sensitivity and the
| need for process-level controls needing a top level menu.
| I would say that part of the friction with window-level
| menus is moving targets. It's less cognitive effort to
| find and hit menu targets that are always in the same
| place on the screen.
|
| Part of the discoverability of menus is learning what
| actions are modal (titles have the ellipsis) and learning
| what hotkeys and key chords do what in the app. There's
| nothing faster than hotkeys. Ideally, users train
| themselves to use hotkeys to get work done and forego the
| menu except to discover additional features.
| wvenable wrote:
| I'm staring at a few apps on Windows right now and none of
| them even have menu bars (Firefox, Outlook, Spotify,
| Notepad, etc).
| archerx wrote:
| I think Firefox's "shift + right click" to bypass context menu
| blocking should be adopted by all browsers.
| ghrl wrote:
| Yeah, it's one of those features where after getting used to it
| you just can't understand why not every browser has it. I
| remember trying to copy an image from OneNote and conveniently
| in the custom content menu there is a button to copy the image.
| The only thing it does however is tell you it doesn't work and
| to use Cmd+C instead, which doesn't work either. So Shift +
| Right Click saves the day again.
| yreg wrote:
| The opening rant is quite fun to read. It's nice that it's
| possible to clean up the context menu in the config.
| agwa wrote:
| In an alternative timeline, Firefox makes their context menu
| really short and someone writes a blog post ranting about how it
| deprives functionality from power users.
|
| In fact, I've read several such rants about Firefox removing
| functionality from other parts of their UI.
|
| It's sure hard to make everyone happy.
| mantra2 wrote:
| You can please some of the people, some of the time.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some
| people can get angry about".
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Yes, I for one love all the options... dont hide menus from me,
| I have a big screen.
| behringer wrote:
| The trick is adding letter selections so you can press the
| underlined letter on your keyboard and get that option! You
| can do things really quickly that way!
| somat wrote:
| It's the duality of user interface design. Two forces at war
| with each other.
|
| The professional interface is a complete mess. flat not
| nested, functionality duplicated all over the place, widgets
| strewn across the screen like a toddler just got done playing
| legos. Exactly what one needs when they will be working with
| it for hours at end.
|
| Contrast with the casual interface, nested, one way to do
| things, neat compartments for everything. What is needed to
| gently guide the user through an unfamiliar task they may
| only do once a year.
|
| And this is ignoring the dark side, the "designer" interface.
| Where it just has look good functionality be damned. Take
| note. The big lie about design is that it exists in a vacuum,
| that there can be an independent design title. Real design is
| fundamentally a holistic process that has to consider and
| integrate all aspects. Including deep engineering. A real
| designer is an engineer with taste, a rare find to be sure.
| elxr wrote:
| > The professional interface is a complete mess. flat not
| nested, functionality duplicated all over the place,
| widgets strewn across the screen like a toddler just got
| done playing legos. Exactly what one needs when they will
| be working with it for hours at end.
|
| Neovim users disagree.
| somat wrote:
| It's flat (technically modal, but that does not make it
| more casual) interface with everything as invisible
| hotkeys and a near command line interface (the legos all
| over the place, actually in this case a better analogy
| would be legos all over the place under water in a
| bathtub)
|
| no, it fits.
| terminalshort wrote:
| And then the professional never uses it anyway because he
| knows all the shortcut keys!
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I really wish they'd just make it easily customizable. I don't
| care if lay-users might mess it up and get confused, such users
| abandoned Firefox years ago anyway.
| wtallis wrote:
| Mozilla should really try taking their extension ecosystem
| seriously, and deliver features like the AI chatbot
| integration as first-party extensions that come pre-installed
| but can be easily managed by users with a much better UI than
| about:config.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar
| for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.
| wtallis wrote:
| Yes, that's one of the things that really should have
| been an extension. Tree Style Tab works alright as an
| extension-provided sidebar.
|
| Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser
| sounds very much like something done by a developer who
| wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't
| aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the
| browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.
| ziml77 wrote:
| And then people would complain about Firefox being bloated
| with all these built-in extensions. And then if you don't
| pre-install them people will complain about needing to add
| all of these extra extensions.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Indeed, and this argument ("it will be too bloated") is
| often used by developers themselves to avoid (or hide)
| advanced features. I never quite understood it. Just put
| all the mysterious flags behind an "Advanced" menu, which
| normie users will know not to touch.
| wtallis wrote:
| There would still be decidedly fewer complaints, because
| extensions are vastly easier to manage and disable or
| remove than this long list of about:config settings. The
| fact that you cannot satisfy everybody simultaneously
| cannot be an excuse for failing to ship with sensible
| defaults and easy, discoverable customization.
| terminalshort wrote:
| They right clicked on an image which is also a clickable
| link which adds the additional options for both links and
| images, a total of 11, to the defaults.
| saghm wrote:
| Honestly, "go into about:config and flip some switches to
| remove stuff" is about as easy as I could imagine for
| allowing people to customize it. What would you suggest?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Yeah, if you turn it all into buttons and settings in the
| actual settings menus, someone else is going to post a long
| rant about how the settings menus have a million confusing
| options that nobody uses...
|
| Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by
| default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-
| problems-and-solutions rant...
| mmsc wrote:
| > Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by
| default
|
| You can run the following and try it for yourself. Don't
| forget to highlight some text before right-clicking an
| image (e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook)
| TMPPROF="$(mktemp -d /tmp/ff-tmp.XXXXXX)"
| /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-
| remote -profile "$TMPPROF"
| pavon wrote:
| They intentionally made the menu longer to look worse by
| selecting some text first. So it is showing four sets of
| contextual actions: For the Link, the Image, the
| Selection, and the Page.
|
| Also a few of the menu items are new since the latest ESR
| (the AI stuff in particular), so you won't see them if
| you are running v140.
| godelski wrote:
| I'd suggest that they make it clearer what the user
| actually changed, in about:config, and show the defaults.
| If I click that button "Show only modified settings" I see
| a lot of things, mostly options that I set from the normal
| settings. I mean "browser.download.lastDir" should be in
| practically everyone's.
|
| So there's a lot of noise and resetting things can be
| unclear. Especially given that when you reinstall things
| not all uninstalls clear out settings. It could definitely
| help if the about:config page tells you about the user.js
| file and directs you to more information. Why doesn't
| editing things in about:config generate the user.js file?
| Maybe tell people about prefer.js and where it exists?
|
| The other thing I'd suggest, documentation. Like what is
| "browser.translations.chaos.errors"? There's a million
| things like that that are hard to learn about and explore.
| In an ideal system there would be a wiki with every option
| documented and when hovering over the option you'd get a
| short explanation and a click is a link to the
| documentation. But that's also a big undertaking (if you're
| building a new browser, would be nice to do this from the
| get go!)
|
| I don't think there's a perfect solution and certainly
| these things are not easy to implement, but if you're
| asking how it could be easier for the user, then yeah, I
| think these things would be major improvements and help
| prevent the blindly following of random blog posts and copy
| pasting of things like betterfox (I'm sure it is, but how
| do I know?)
| weaksauce wrote:
| there is a middle ground where you could do something like
| about:mouse (about:keyboard for keyboard shortcuts already
| exists) for the power users. doesn't need to be fancy but
| it would be easy enough to do.
| bityard wrote:
| Yes. But also, lay users are not nearly as dumb/incompetent
| as UX designers allege when they rationalize removing
| features to "simplify things."
| w0m wrote:
| yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs
| tweaks.
|
| To each their own; glad it's an option :)
| autoexec wrote:
| How about Firefox just not fill their context menu with
| bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for like google
| lens _and_ make it fully /easily customizable so that most
| users are happy and power users can add whatever they want.
|
| It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It literally already is fully customizable. between
| userChrome, about:config, and extensions, you can do
| literally anything you like to your right click menu on
| Firefox.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd argue that you shouldn't need third party add-ons plus
| modifications to both userChrome and about:config to do it,
| so it could be easier. A "Customize Context Menu" under
| Edit would be nice and easy for even regular users to
| discover and take advantage of.
| sfink wrote:
| Why is my Edit menu so long? What is this "Customize
| Context Menu" thing that I never use, or will use at most
| once a year?
|
| Just kidding, but it does illustrate that there's always
| a tradeoff with these things. (I would like to have the
| ability to customize the context menu too, fwiw, though
| it's not as straightforward as the other customizable
| bits of UI since the context menu is, well,
| _contextual_.)
| grayhatter wrote:
| about:config where you need a search engine to find all the
| key strings does not count as easy in this context. And
| it's unreasonable to pretend it is.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _makes it fully /easily customizable so that most users are
| happy [...] It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy._
|
| considering that it is already fully customizable, yet you
| are still complaining about it, i dont think so
| autoexec wrote:
| > How about Firefox just not fill their context menu with
| bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for like
| google lens _and_ [...] It 's pretty damn easy to make
| everyone happy
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _shit nobody asked for_
|
| i use (or have used) most of them. other people in this
| thread have said they used all of them at one point or
| another.
|
| just because _you_ dont use it does not make it
| "bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for". thats
| why you have the option to remove them :)
|
| whats the next complaint?
| autoexec wrote:
| That's why https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/google-lens-s... exists. Google lens is
| exactly the kind of thing add-ons are for. Some people
| might like it, they should be able to install it, but it
| doesn't belong in the browser by default.
|
| This is the same mistake they made with Pocket and I'm
| guessing it was done for the same reason (money) since
| they went with a Google product and not Bing Visual
| Search or for that matter letting users configure what
| service they'd like to use for image searches. This was
| pure bloat. It's no different from Windows adding candy
| crush to the desktop by default where the same argument
| "Some people play it and it can be removed!" does nothing
| to change what it is: bloat that nobody asked for.
| Snortibartfast wrote:
| Or you could do like Vivaldi, and have every menu configurable
| :)
| darkwater wrote:
| Which adds more UI to control the feature as well, which
| someone will find ugly and unnecessary.
| grayhatter wrote:
| This isn't as simple as making everyone happy.
|
| It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have
| asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they
| could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would
| asking would effect the shareholders!!
|
| I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make
| everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone,
| it's about treating users with respect, and _not_ jumping on
| the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially
| because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI
| is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy
| violating... From the privacy focused browser...
| abtinf wrote:
| One day, all of you LLM posters will get what you deserve.
| agwa wrote:
| The blog post is also complaining about the options to create
| a screenshot, copy a link to a text fragment, copy a link
| without trackers, debug accessibility issues, auto-fill a
| form, and even to print the page.
|
| Also, Mozilla Corporation's sole "shareholder" is the not-
| for-profit Mozilla Foundation.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Could they have asked me if I wanted to enable 100 different
| browser features? Yes they could have, but why would they b/c
| that's incredibly annoying. If you don't like it you don't
| have to use it. The AI option doesn't send anything to the
| server unless you explicitly tell it to, so that is 100%
| compatible with a privacy focused browser.
| NoSalt wrote:
| Maybe what the author is saying is that Firefox should make it
| much easier to configure these "options".
| godelski wrote:
| > It's sure hard to make everyone happy.
|
| I definitely think this is a hard task and it's pretty apparent
| with Firefox. I mean no matter what they do people are going to
| be very vocal and upset about it.
|
| But to talk more generally, I think finding the balance of what
| options to expose to normal users and then how to expose things
| to power users is quite challenging. I think a big mistake
| people make is to just ignore power users and act like that
| just because they're a small percentage of users that they
| aren't important[0].
|
| I think what makes computers so successful is the fact that
| computers aren't really a product designed "for _everyone_ ,"
| instead, they're built as environments that can be turned into
| a thing that _anyone_ needs. Which is why your power users
| become important and in a way, why this balance is hard to
| strike because in some sense every user is a power user. Nobody
| has the same programs installed on their computers, nobody has
| the same apps installed on their phones, each and every device
| is unique. You give them the power to make it their own, and
| that 's the only way you can truly build something that works
| for everyone.
|
| This is why I think computers are magic! But I think we've lost
| this idea. We've been regressing to the mean. The problem is
| when you create something for everybody you end up making
| something for nobody.
|
| [0] I think Jack Conte (Patreon/Pomplamoose) explains it well
| here. It's the subset that is passionate that are often your
| greatest ally. No matter what you sell, most of the money comes
| from a small subset of buyers. The same is true with whatever
| metric we look at. As a musician a small subset of listeners
| are the ones that introduce you to the most people, buy the
| most merch, and all that that makes you successful. It's not
| the average "user" but the "power user".
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUndMfMInc
|
| At 13:00 he quotes Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired) and I think
| it captures the thesis of this talk In the age
| of the internet, you don't need millions of fans to be
| successful. If you can just find 1000 people who are willing to
| buy $100 of stuff from you per year, that's $100k/yr.
| 6510 wrote:
| I had a dumb phone once that got it right.
|
| It had one fixed menu entry called "advanced menu" this
| replaces the menu with one that has everything (except from
| "advanced menu" which is replaced with "simple menu").
|
| One of the menu entries is "configure simple menu". This opens
| the same looking menu as "advanced menu" only clicking any
| functionality toggles a check mark in front of it.
|
| If a sub menu had less than 3 options it is merged into the
| parent menu.
|
| One plays with it for a bit and before long it becomes a
| Japanese celebration of emptiness.
|
| It even had a bunch of sort of redundant options. The sms
| submenu had something like 8 options of which I only really
| used "new message" and "all messages" but you could go for
| "unread messages". It's not like the rest of the menu is gone,
| its all under "advanced menu".
|
| If the right click menu worked like that some would bother to
| further configure the simple menu and one could share their
| config.
|
| To make it clear it is not a "more" button "advanced" could
| fold out the hidden entries like a harmonica.
| weaksauce wrote:
| I don't know what I've done to have a small right click menu
| but mine is only a handful of options and I even tried
| selecting an image and a link and some text to get all the
| options.
| mantra2 wrote:
| I wish they had an always up to date guide on what each
| about:config option does.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Or make them more discoverable. I spent so much time looking
| for a UI scaling setting, and in the end it turned out its name
| does not contain any obvious word like _scale_ or _size_ ,
| instead it is called _devPixelsPerPx_. It isn 't even
| consistent about Pixels vs Px.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > It isn't even consistent about Pixels vs Px.
|
| px is the CSS unit, device pixels aren't.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Good to know it has some logic to it, thanks for the
| clarification
| jadar wrote:
| i see the author has a small vocabulary.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| This is disabling features entirely - I take screenshots using
| the Firefox feature sometimes, but never with the right click
| option. Same for autofills, printing, and devtool a11y features.
| I don't like the clutter, but I can't disable these either.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _I take screenshots using the Firefox feature sometimes, but
| never with the right click option._
|
| Um ... how else do you access this feature?
|
| (I use the context menu's item for that _all the time_ ...
| since that 's the only way at it that I know of.)
| saratogacx wrote:
| Ctrl-shift-s
| imp0cat wrote:
| You can also put a tiny camera icon in the tool bar and
| take a screenshot by clicking on that.
| EvilTerran wrote:
| You can add a screenshot button to the toolbar from the
| "Customise Toolbar" screen, does the exact same thing as that
| context menu item.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| By pressing the context-menu key when the element is selected
| in DevTools.
| anonym29 wrote:
| just use a gecko fork without the AI loael
|
| librewolf is great
| mmsc wrote:
| loael
| wackget wrote:
| These prefs - and many others - can be placed in a user.js file:
| https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Long ago, I culled some items from the context menu via
| userChrome.css.
|
| 1. In about:config, turn pref
| toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets on.
|
| 2. Create chrome/userChrome.css in your profile directory (which
| you can find from about:support).
|
| 3. Open the _Browser Toolbox_ with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I or [?] - More
| tools - Browser Toolbox or Tools - Browser Tools - Browser
| Toolbox or some such thing. This is dev tools _for the browser_.
|
| 4. In the Inspector tab, search #contentAreaContextMenu to
| navigate to the <menupopup id="contentAreaContextMenu" ...>
| element.
|
| 5. Look through its children. Decide which ones you don't want,
| then kill them in CSS.
|
| From my userChrome.css (I think this must be something like a
| decade old because I started typing curly quotes somewhere around
| then): /* I don't want *two* items for Inspect,
| just the one main one please. */ #context-inspect-a11y,
| /* I'm happy to use Ctrl+Shift+S; I don't need a context menu
| item for it. */ #context-take-screenshot, #context-
| sep-screenshots, /* I don't use Firefox's password manager.
| */ #fill-login, #fill-login-generated-password,
| #manage-saved-logins, #passwordmgr-items-separator {
| display: none; }
|
| The article takes the approach of disabling features (e.g.
| devtools.accessibility.enabled). I take the approach of leaving
| the features enabled (I _want_ the accessibility stuff!) and just
| removing the specific context menu item that I found annoying.
|
| (... and I see at the end of the article that this approach is
| what the next post is to be about. Heh. Posted before reading to
| the end. Probably would still have posted roughly the same
| thing.)
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The other great use for userChrome is reclaiming the space at
| the top of the browser if you use tree-style tabs. With just
| the url bar, the window is close enough to full-screen when I
| close the tab tree that I rarely feel the need to use F11.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Important for macOS: You must set "widget.macos.native-context-
| menus" to "false" or else you can't inspect/modify the context
| menu through userChrome.css.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > To be blunt: holy fucking shit, what the fuck is all of this
| shit? 26 rows of which 2 are greyed-out (aka: fucking useless)
|
| Chef's kiss.
| pmontra wrote:
| That was a really long menu. I do use "Save Link As..." when the
| link is obviously a file to download and I don't want it in the
| default folder.
|
| I think that I never used "Set Image as Desktop Background..." in
| all my life. That's a very narrow use case to get its own menu
| entry.
| layer8 wrote:
| Incidentally, "Save Link As..." is mislabeled, because it
| doesn't save the link (which would be possible), but the
| resource the link points to. It still confuses me whenever I
| occasionally see it.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| By that measure "Open Link in [...]" should open a text
| viewer showing the URL instead of retrieving the resource
| that links points to. I rather have the current behaviour.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm not arguing for changing the behavior, but for changing
| the label. Safari uses "Download Linked File", which makes
| much more sense.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| And I'm arguing that this term is used in exactly that
| meaning everywhere and is the expected use of the word
| "link".
| layer8 wrote:
| I disagree that this is standard usage. Saving a link is
| like saving a bookmark.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I use "translate selection" all the time, but a proper menu
| editor wouldn't go amiss. Remember when apps had those?
| WarmWash wrote:
| For some reason Mozilla has been super focused on firefox feature
| pack rather than general usability for some time now. It's
| obviously not been working, but they must be convinced that if
| they just add xyz new feature, firefox will make a comeback.
|
| Just make the goddamn browser fast, lightweight, and stable.
| Forget everything else.
|
| Except spell check. Please god fix that too.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I just want to take a moment to note that I am _very_ grateful
| for the flexibility of this configuration and that it affords the
| power/option to disable scrolling with a stylus (effectively
| dumbing it down to an 11th touch input) and allowing it to
| function as I've come to expect since the days of PenPoint and
| Windows for Pen Computing to select text and so forth.
| deathanatos wrote:
| ... railing against greyed-out items is... interesting. One of my
| biggest peeves with a lot of modern software is the trend of
| "gaslight the user about the existence of functionality".
|
| A lot of software (Github, Okta, etc. etc.) will just delete
| portions of their UI, usually because you don't have permission
| to access it, or even just _some_ of it. So, if you google "how
| do I do X?" the AI -- assuming it gets it right at all -- will
| tell you to click on UI that doesn't exist. Even if you then
| scroll to the organic docs, _those_ will _also_ have you click UI
| that _does not exist_.
|
| A greyed-out item gives you the affordance of knowing that that
| feature / path _exists_ , even if it's not available right here,
| right now. Truly good UI would also give me an affordance of
| knowing _why_ (e.g., a tooltip saying "to access blah, you need
| permission blah"), but that's just asking for the moon, I know.
|
| But when you're staring at docs referencing a non-existence menu
| item: is it because I lack a permission? What permission? Or
| perhaps the docs are just out of date? -- you don't know!
| the_bear wrote:
| Agreed. Unless it's a _really_ frequently used UI, my company
| defaults to showing all options to all users regardless of
| permissions. It 's better to see "Manage users" in the settings
| menu which takes you to a page explaining that you don't have
| permission as opposed to seeing nothing and wondering why it's
| not there even though the help article says it should be there
| _.
|
| _ No, putting an explanation on the help article that this
| feature is only available to admins doesn't work. No one reads
| anything.
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I've been wondering about the Polish thing. On the screenshot at
| the top of the page, it reads "Translate Selection to Polish,"
| and I initially thought this might just be something gleaned from
| the author's locale, but the tld is .hu, and I recall seeing
| "Polish" as the default "international" language option on a
| number of services (such as Google Translate).
|
| Is there a technical reason for this that Polish is defaulted to
| more often than not? Or is this just a me thing.
| mmsc wrote:
| It's gleaned from my locale. .hu is irrelevant; my alternative
| keyboard on my system is Polish
| olivia-banks wrote:
| Interesting. I've never been to Poland and yet Polish the
| default second option in a ton of places for me. No clue why.
| silverwind wrote:
| Mozilla really needs to trim this menu down by default. Who needs
| "Print selection" in this day and age?
| reciprocity wrote:
| The Windows 11 right click contextual menu is an order of
| magnitude worse. Not only that, but the delay in opening is
| more than perceptible. Annoying regression.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| What if you don't want the whole webpage printed with all the
| images, menus and potential ads? Sure you can also select it in
| the devtools, but context menu is way easier.
| SllX wrote:
| All those items in the context menu are one of the reasons that
| context menus are so good. Ideally you never need to go to the
| menu bar for much of anything because the right menu item is
| right there in the context menu where your cursor is already
| aiming.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The newest Firefox build has a nice feature: you highlight some
| text on a page, and instead of having to right-click and navigate
| to the AI submenu to bring up a list of canned prompts, none of
| which are what you actually want to ask, it just pops up a button
| next to the highlighted text that you can click to enter a prompt
| immediately.
|
| So this guy's rant, besides not making a whole lot of sense
| (first he complains about the length of the right-click menu,
| then he complains that they moved the AI stuff to a side
| menu...?) is also obsolete.
| g947o wrote:
| I wonder when was the last time any user used the "Email image"
| feature.
| qbrass wrote:
| Intentionally? I've only ever "used" it when trying to copy a
| link to an image.
| eikenberry wrote:
| No way to remove the most annoying thing.. how Copy takes the top
| spot away from the back arrow when you've highlighted text of any
| sort. I don't mind the Copy option but don't change the standard
| menu, add it to the bottom.
| sznio wrote:
| this is how ui was supposed to be.
|
| i can pick out the button i want instantly. i don't have to
| navigate multiple buttons to do anything
| bayesianbot wrote:
| Just as FYI, for people currently using firefox or want to use
| firefox but found its keyboard control (or plugins like
| Vimperator) lacking, I really recommend glide[0] highly.
|
| I've used qutebrowser for years as I feel the keyboard controlled
| web is much more convenient, and there hasn't been any reasonable
| competition to qutebrowser. The vim keyboard control plugins for
| chrome or firefox don't fit the bill for me, they feel slow, are
| often out of focus, and quite limited.
|
| glide fixes all of those problems, supports firefox extensions
| and has a really powerful and approachable scripting API. It's
| alpha but feels quite ready, I've been running it a few weeks
| full time and loved the experience.
|
| [0] https://github.com/glide-browser/glide
| drecked wrote:
| My issue with this post isn't so much the post itself but with
| what it demonstrates about culture today.
|
| 20 years ago one would have written the same post on Blogger but
| the odds are it would have been framed as "here's how you can
| clean up the Firefox menu".
|
| It's not like vitriolic content didn't exist. But the vitriolic
| content was usually limited to holy war posts, when a Mac user
| was disparaging PCs or vice versa, or if it was a vim vs emacs
| conversation. And even then there was an understanding that no
| one was being entirely serious.
|
| But in today's social media/political environment, every post is
| turned up to 11.
| grayhatter wrote:
| I'm sure part of this is hindsight bias, but software was less
| intentionally user hostile in the before times.
|
| Firefox used to release features that improved privacy. Today
| they add features that reduce privacy. Enabled by default, with
| no easy way to disable or remove the spyware link.
|
| The tone should shift, in step with how much disrespect
| companies decide to inflict on their users.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| >intentionally user hostile
|
| They want more users, so logically it cannot be intentional.
| More generally, we cannot know others' intentions, so the
| speculation is always redundant.
| Sabinus wrote:
| This would be more relevant if the ui features being
| 'discussed' were privacy violating, but they're not. Anger
| about privacy violations (mostly by other software and
| companies) doesn't justify vitriol about right click context
| menus in an open source browser.
| Snortibartfast wrote:
| Ironically, the only[1] right-click option I used was changed
| into something more cumbersome: "open image" which was changed to
| "open image in new tab".
|
| [1] I exaggerate a bit, sometimes I use uBlock Origin's "block
| element".
| kyusan0 wrote:
| There must be something wrong with Firefox on MacOS, I don't
| experience the same on linux. Options only show up when relevant,
| i.e. Save Image as only when hovering over an image, translate
| selection only when text is highlighted with the cursor, etc.
|
| The longest right click menu I could find by clicking around
| various elements is no more than 12 items, two of which are from
| extensions.
|
| I'd love to know why it's different.
| tim-kt wrote:
| But this is addressed in the first sentence?
|
| > [...] right-clicking an image while some text on the page is
| highlighted (to show as many buttons as possible) looks like so
| kyusan0 wrote:
| My bad, I glossed over that.
|
| Now I tested that too, it doesn't work that way for me, even
| if there's text highlighted (both regular text or a
| hyperlink) the menu remains contextualised.
| Krastan wrote:
| He says he highlighted some text then right clicked on an image
| to make it show as many items as possible.
| SkySkimmer wrote:
| >right-clicking an image while some text on the page is
| highlighted (to show as many buttons as possible)
|
| Actually an image which is also a link for extra buttons (typical
| wikipedia image AFAICT)
| Krssst wrote:
| The article talks of other menu entries but the screenshot of the
| menu literally shows the "Remove AI chatbot" option, why not just
| click that instead of hunting for it in about:config?
| kemayo wrote:
| As an aside, it does seem like a bit of a bad sign for a
| feature that you know up-front that it'll be so polarizing that
| you need to have an always-visible top-level "hide this
| forever!" button.
| jez wrote:
| Still the only thing I miss about the Firefox right-click context
| menu coming from Chrome is that Firefox doesn't have a "Look up
| '<selection>'" in the menu on macOS, to look up in the macOS
| dictionary, for looking up words I don't know.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391
| ubercow13 wrote:
| The "Email Image..." one is infuriating. Who right clicks an
| image to email it to someone in 2026? And if it's you, could you
| help me understand why??
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Every random app now-a-days has share buttons. Why shouldn't
| the browser have on, when it is inherently about browsing a
| network resource?
| Maken wrote:
| It's still more useful than the "Set as desktop background"
| entry.
| layer8 wrote:
| > of which 2 are greyed-out (aka: fucking useless)
|
| It actually makes sense, because instead of wondering where the
| option is, you learn that it is not applicable in the given
| context. It also supports the spatial memory you have of the
| surrounding options.
| LikeBeans wrote:
| A while back I wanted more menu options with Firefox so I made an
| extension [1]. Basically when you highlight a word or a sentence
| on a page a menu popups up with some options like to copy,
| search, or lookup on Google maps. Or whatever option you want. I
| use it often and find it useful.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-
| tooltip...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > Basically when you highlight a word or a sentence on a page a
| menu popups up with some options like to copy, search
|
| Huh, beside Google Maps, that's what the default context menu
| does in Firefox?
| LikeBeans wrote:
| Yeah the Google Maps was my primary goal. But I was also
| thinking a person can add other options. For example
| different search engines. Or maybe your favorite AI agent
| search.
| 6510 wrote:
| I just notice they made about:config suck more.
|
| Articles about entries use to be able to do:
|
| about:config?filter=browser.translations.select.enable
|
| Now all that does is show this stupid "be careful" warning.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| > Removes the "Translate Selection" button from the right-click
| menu.
|
| I don't want the Translate button to NEVER be there. I want it to
| be there if and only if the selection is not in English.
| kps wrote:
| How would it know?
| devmor wrote:
| Holy crap, I use Firefox every day on Windows and MacOS and I've
| never seen a menu like that.
|
| Of course, I've never _selected an entire page section of
| multimedia content_ and right clicked on it before.
|
| Of course the menu has a lot of options - you've given it
| multiple contexts and it's a context menu.
| lifis wrote:
| The improvement that could be made is to reorganize the menu so
| that entries are grouped in "Image", "Link", "Text", "Page" and
| "Development" sections, which could either be submenus or titled
| sections depending on screen size and user preferences
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| Does uBlock Origin do something like this by default? I noticed
| that my right-click menu looks completely sane; almost identical
| to the end, clean result. But I've never done this particular
| config cleanup before.
| oniony wrote:
| There are actually eight dividers.
| elxr wrote:
| In a way, this shows why I generally love using webapps over
| desktop apps. The level of quick customizability for something as
| basic as a right-click is impressive.
|
| Love that firefox offers so much control, despite the
| questionable defaults.
| edelind wrote:
| I don't know, I am quite a power user of some stuff he removed.
| Especially Services! that is a gem in itself if you know how to
| use it.
| jerhewet wrote:
| Hmm. I guess I'm living the good life with all of the Firefox
| configuration changes I've made over the years. I have six right-
| click menu items and four buttons (page back, page forward,
| reload, and bookmark):
|
| Save Page As, Select All, Take Screenshot, View Page Source,
| Inspect Accessibility Properties, and Inspect.
|
| And one additional entry for uBlock Origin at the bottom of the
| menu (Block Element).
| gethly wrote:
| i switched to waterfox last week and the context menu is better
| from the get-go. and no AI either.
| shultays wrote:
| "Bookmark Link..." "Save Link As..." "Email Image..."
| "Set Image as Desktop Background..." "Bookmark Page..."
| ... we can't get rid of these things by simply toggling some
| option in about:config ...
|
| Why seemingly the most useless options are not in about:config
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