Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

https://joshua.hu/firefox-making-right-click-not-suck

by mmsc • 5 months ago

351 223 5 months ago

joshua.hu

wvenable2• 5 months ago

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.

paulddraper2• 5 months ago

+1 This has been true for, what, 30 years?

plorkyeran3• 5 months ago

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).

TonyTrapp• 5 months ago

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.

layer88• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Indeed both the "..." and "disabling over removing" were in the windows 95 UI manual

pdntspa• 5 months ago

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...

unethical_ban• 5 months ago

Before tearing something down, ask why it was built.

lucianbr2• 5 months ago

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.

mmsc6• 5 months ago

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."

CamperBob22• 5 months ago

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.

paulddraper2• 5 months ago

It's strange, because they do know about:config....

Zopieux3• 5 months ago

I feel old. Every single millennial versed into computers knows about this convention, which I think probably comes from Windows, back when they paid their employees to care.

Narishma• 5 months ago

It was already there in the original Mac, and is probably older than that.

eviks6• 5 months ago

How would a user learn about this convention?

varun_ch• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

interestingly, I have these options in Firefox

aftbit2• 5 months ago

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.

yreg2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

That one gets used a lot when someone leaves their laptop unlocked at college.

plorkyeran3• 5 months ago

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?

aftbit2• 5 months ago

I don't have that option on Linux, but then my desktop background is being drawn by feh launched from .xinitrc. It probably works on Gnome or whatever.

dwoldrich5• 5 months ago

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

layer88• 5 months ago

Fitts’s law for menu bars made sense on a 12” monitor back then, but not so much on today’s large displays.

dwoldrich5• 5 months ago

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.

wpm• 5 months ago

No, they still make sense and work just fine on large displays.

I have two 2880x2560 displays on my Mac. A flick of the trackball gets me to the menubar no matter where the window is or how large it is.

eviks6• 5 months ago

Better to give me everything I can discover in a menu

Of course you're not given everything, that'd be hundreds of items

rather than make a zillion fugly buttons and cluttering up the chrome.

This isn't the only alternative

menu the ultimate discoverability tool

It isn't very discoverable, there is no search and no good convenient contextual explanation of what the options are

So a failure across all your metrics

dwoldrich5• 5 months ago

So a failure across all your metrics

Hey what's with the jerky tone? Are we competing for dominance now? Was Steve Jobs a bad guy and so I am by mentioning him? He had good taste, and people aren't one-dimensional cartoon characters, you git.

hundreds of items

Pedantry. The ellipsis items covers some categorized feature drill downs that don't get top billing, the sub menus others.

This isn't the only alternative

Captain Obvious does it again ladies and gentlemen!

Many managers have to show engagement with their feature to be successful and would love to shove it in your face with a shiny button. See the copilot button getting added to every Microsoft Office product even if it's not integrated at all - shameful!

It isn't very discoverable, there is no search

Thank goodness I can save face here, 'discoverable' is a binary quality: something either is or isn't discoverable and a browsable menu IS.

Plenty of vendors put a search on their Help menu. (It usually sucks, to be fair.) Jetbrains has an auto-completing action search that exposes practically every action the IDE can effect by their titles.

Wow, search CAN help, amazing insight! Why aren't you advising diplomats and statesmen?

kelnos• 5 months ago

This isn't about per-window menu bars, though; it's about context menus. macOS still has those.

dwoldrich5• 5 months ago

Discoverability was why I decided to discuss menus in the first place and I was being a bit of a contrarian by expressing happiness for the kitchen sink aspect to the "right-click" context menu.

Not everyone will understand the dilemma that UX designers have about surfacing their features without causing clutter and distraction, and I was trying to start a conversation about that.

archerx• 5 months ago

I think Firefox’s “shift + right click” to bypass context menu blocking should be adopted by all browsers.

ghrl• 5 months ago

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.

yreg2• 5 months ago

The opening rant is quite fun to read. It's nice that it's possible to clean up the context menu in the config.

agwa2• 5 months ago

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.

mantra22• 5 months ago

You can please some of the people, some of the time.

NoboruWataya• 5 months ago

My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some people can get angry about".

wolvoleo• 5 months ago

I sure hated it when windows 11 dumbed down the explorer context menu. Lots of stuff I used to do a lot now took 2 clicks instead of one.

Luckily it can simply be switched off.

heraldgeezer• 5 months ago

Yes, I for one love all the options... dont hide menus from me, I have a big screen.

behringer• 5 months ago

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!

somat2• 5 months ago

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.

mikkupikku2• 5 months ago

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.

wtallis4• 5 months ago

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.

saghm• 5 months ago

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?

bityard• 5 months ago

Yes. But also, lay users are not nearly as dumb/incompetent as UX designers allege when they rationalize removing features to "simplify things."

w0m• 5 months ago

yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs tweaks.

To each their own; glad it's an option :)

autoexec4• 5 months ago

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.

OkayPhysicist3• 5 months ago

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.

john_strinlai2• 5 months ago

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

Snortibartfast2• 5 months ago

Or you could do like Vivaldi, and have every menu configurable :)

darkwater2• 5 months ago

Which adds more UI to control the feature as well, which someone will find ugly and unnecessary.

grayhatter4• 5 months ago

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...

agwa2• 5 months ago

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.

terminalshort3• 5 months ago

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.

iknowstuff• 5 months ago

Mozilla does not have shareholders

eipi10_hn• 5 months ago

Which shareholders?

Ukv• 5 months ago

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!!

IMO right clicking and selecting translate/summarize/OCR/etc. is that choice. It doesn't translate pages by default, and the translation models are not downloaded until you choose to do so.

I feel what you're asking is for the option to see the option to also be disabled by default. But, it's a useful feature for many people and hiding it in this way would harm discoverability.

NoSalt• 5 months ago

Maybe what the author is saying is that Firefox should make it much easier to configure these "options".

godelski2• 5 months ago

  > 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.

adithyassekhar• 5 months ago

In the smartphone world it's the same until it's not https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=PhgMQ_cDkR7vMQfC

65102• 5 months ago

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.

weaksauce2• 5 months ago

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.

eviks6• 5 months ago

This is just a silly excuse to do nothing to clean your garbage.

Easy customization with thoughtful defaults is an easy way to make everyone happy

how it deprives functionality from power users.

That's already the case, so nothing changes here to justify the current situation

pseudohadamard• 5 months ago

TFA pretty much summed it up with:

  Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped

And that's what it is, we'll just use the right-click menu as a garbage dump for every feature we've added. I've currently got my right-click menu down to eight entries, of which four are extensions I added (NoScript, DownThemAll, etc), and the four built-in ones are things I've never, ever used in 20+ years as a Firefox user. I'm also running RightLinks which turns right clicks on a link into "Open in New Tab", which is what I want to do, oh, approximately 100% of the time I right-click on a link (for the epsilon times I don't want to do that you can override with Ctrl-Click to get the original menu back). Its actually painful watching users who haven't overridden the Firefox builtins use right-click, "right-click, scroll, scroll, pause to check, scroll, click".

Groxx2• 5 months ago

Also consistency. I personally hate entries appearing and disappearing (e.g. "copy clean link"), I would much rather have a stable UI with disabled elements if something is sometimes relevant to invisible context (like href attributes).

Otherwise you get "where is X? It was here yesterday!" issues, and those are practically impossible to figure out if you don't already know why it behaves that way. At least a disabled entry tells you "this exists, it just isn't applicable" rather than "lol what? maybe we removed it".

mantra22• 5 months ago

I wish they had an always up to date guide on what each about:config option does.

alpaca1282• 5 months ago

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.

17186274408• 5 months ago

It isn't even consistent about Pixels vs Px.

px is the CSS unit, device pixels aren't.

jadar• 5 months ago

i see the author has a small vocabulary.

captn3m0• 5 months ago

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.

deathanatos2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Ctrl-shift-s

EvilTerran• 5 months ago

You can add a screenshot button to the toolbar from the "Customise Toolbar" screen, does the exact same thing as that context menu item.

17186274408• 5 months ago

By pressing the context-menu key when the element is selected in DevTools.

anonym29• 5 months ago

just use a gecko fork without the AI loael

librewolf is great

mmsc6• 5 months ago

loael

wackget• 5 months ago

These prefs - and many others - can be placed in a user.js file: https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox

chrismorgan• 5 months ago

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.)

OkayPhysicist3• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

asadotzler• 5 months ago

This is the way. Turning off features only to unclutter a menu is silly and I can't believe there's not more pushback than your post here. userChrome.css exists for this exact reason, mucking about in UI without mucking about in feature machinery. I guess a text file and some CSS is just too hard many HN users.

wiseowise• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

layer88• 5 months ago

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.

17186274408• 5 months ago

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.

brynnbee2• 5 months ago

I think "link" here is serving the same function as telling your GPS to navigate to an address. It's obviously not navigating to a string of letters and numbers, it's navigating to what it represents (the physical matter located at the address). Same for saving a link.

chuckadams• 5 months ago

I use "translate selection" all the time, but a proper menu editor wouldn't go amiss. Remember when apps had those?

WarmWash• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

deathanatos2• 5 months ago

… 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• 5 months ago

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.

array_key_first• 5 months ago

Modern software UX is gaslight central. I think people are scared that if users read something they'll get confused or frustrated, so they just default to... nothing? Even error messages are dying. Half the time shit doesn't work and there's no indication. Maybe a loading spinner just disappears and that's supposed to be your clue to try again.

Zopieux3• 5 months ago

Thanks for putting this into words better then I would. I was screaming discoverablity at my screen.

olivia-banks2• 5 months ago

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.

mmsc6• 5 months ago

It's gleaned from my locale. .hu is irrelevant; my alternative keyboard on my system is Polish

olivia-banks2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Mozilla really needs to trim this menu down by default. Who needs "Print selection" in this day and age?

reciprocity• 5 months ago

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.

17186274408• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

CamperBob22• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

I wonder when was the last time any user used the "Email image" feature.

qbrass• 5 months ago

Intentionally? I've only ever "used" it when trying to copy a link to an image.

eikenberry• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

grayhatter4• 5 months ago

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.

bluebarbet2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

Snortibartfast2• 5 months ago

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".

kyusan02• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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

kyusan02• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

He says he highlighted some text then right clicked on an image to make it show as many items as possible.

SkySkimmer• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

sfink2• 5 months ago

Why? Shouldn't polarizing features be done exactly this way? The people on one pole use it, those on the other remove it. Perhaps you meant "unwanted" or "unpopular"?

If you never add any features that could be polarizing, then you end up with a lowest common denominator interface that offends nobody and is useful to (almost) nobody.

jez• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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??

17186274408• 5 months ago

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?

Maken2• 5 months ago

It's still more useful than the "Set as desktop background" entry.

layer88• 5 months ago

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.

LikeBeans2• 5 months ago

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...

17186274408• 5 months ago

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?

LikeBeans2• 5 months ago

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.

memcg• 4 months ago

Thank you! Your extension is really helpful.

65102• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

kps4• 5 months ago

How would it know?

Zopieux3• 5 months ago

Have you heard of machine learning?

devmor• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

There are actually eight dividers.

elxr2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

i switched to waterfox last week and the context menu is better from the get-go. and no AI either.

shultays• 5 months ago

  “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

willrshansen• 5 months ago

The way sidebery let's you customize it's right click menu seems to be the right way to go about it

mrandish• 5 months ago

Very nice. I didn't have some of those. Thanks for posting!

For those of us who have a user.js file to keep all these about:config customizations over time and across installs... here they are formatted for user.js:

  user_pref("privacy.query_stripping.strip_on_share.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.translations.select.enable", false);
  user_pref("screenshots.browser.component.enabled", false);
  user_pref("dom.text-recognition.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate", false);
  user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
  user_pref("dom.text_fragments.enabled", false);

Also, there's a nice little toolkit for removing items from all the Firefox right-click menus: https://github.com/stonecrusher/simpleMenuWizard.

lkbm• 5 months ago

That toolkit looks great. I have a big ol' userChrome.css removing ~15 menu items, but I may switch to this next time I work on improving things again.

laalshaitaan• 5 months ago

The pattern is always the same: product team has a new AI feature, someone says put it everywhere, nobody asks users if they want it, and then power users revolt while the feature languishes unused anyway. The right move was opt-in, but that would've made the adoption numbers look bad. Progressive disclosure exists for a reason.

zeagle• 5 months ago

Is it different on Windows from MacOS? I have AI features disabled on firefox 148.0 and my options on an image are a reasonable list of Open Image in New Tab, Save Image As..., Copy Image, Copy Image Link, Email Image, Set Image as Desktop Background..., Take Screenshot, Inspect Accessibility Properties, Inspect (Q) and two related to extensions that are my choice (Block Element..., Bitwarden). For links I get the Open in (...) options. If I enable AI features I get one extra menu. And very niche to disable print.enabled so you can't print from your browser?

eviks6• 5 months ago

But the real bad news is that we can’t get rid of these things by simply toggling some option in about:config.

In a better designed customizable browser like Vivaldi you can just see the menu itself and move/edit/remove/add items aroudn.

In a better mythical app you would be able to add an easy way to do those edits right there from the page context menu

tdeck• 5 months ago

Is there a way to disable Ctrl+Shift+C yet? That's my only longstanding complaint in Firefox.

evilpie• 5 months ago

Yes. It's in about:keyboard.

Markoff• 5 months ago

Wait, you need to go to about:config to customize your right click context menu by disabling items one by one and you don't have normal Settings UI to customize it?

Vivaldi browser desktop user (Settings → Appearance → Menu → Choose “Page” in the Menu Customization dropdown)

wink• 5 months ago

I don't care about the tone or any inconsistencies, it's a good list.

LocalPCGuy• 5 months ago

Bit sad that the DevTools Accessibility Inspector was one of the "superfluous" items, at least without a "if you're not a dev" type of disclaimer. If you do any web development, seems like a worthwhile item and I'm happy it is surfaced by default to help promote it's use.

Obviously, no issues with non-devs who would never use it disabling it.

hexage1814• 5 months ago

There used to be a great extension to edit context menu easily (you can still do it using userchrome.css).

Mozilla kill when it moved from XUL to web extension. Mozilla is run by people who don't use Firefox nor care.

HackerThemAll• 5 months ago

Yeah, former Opera employee making fun from Firefox. So cool.

To respond: Remember you just took Google software, changed skin, added more telemetry and spying eyes, and call it a browser.

mmsc6• 5 months ago

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Please consider reading.

Baljhin• 5 months ago

Another post listed the Arkenfox project, but that's focused on privacy & security, and secondarily performance -- not on UI/UX. (Changing some parameters might affect contextmenu entries.)

It's a thankless task - except by nontech browser users - to modify Fx's menus. Anybody remember the XUL-era addon 'Menu Editor'? So many years and so much effort to make it 'simple' for typical users to customize Menu Bar and context-menus; and always a target that refused to stay standard given Firefox version changes ALWAYS break something about the UI. Ultimately a valiant but unrewarded failure, no blame to the 'Menu Editor' developer(s) and userbase.

As the writer will learn, the 'best' way to UI changes current (and XUL) Firefox is via userChrome.js/.css -- which has also had troubled history, as waves of main-office Fx developers have been openly hostile to promoting and supporting is functionalities.

[0] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config

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