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

wvenable

> 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.

varun_ch

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

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.

aftbit

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.

dwoldrich

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

archerx

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

yreg

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

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

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

jadar

i see the author has a small vocabulary.

captn3m0

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.

anonym29

just use a gecko fork without the AI loael librewolf is great

wackget

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

chrismorgan

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.)

wiseowise

> 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

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.

chuckadams

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

WarmWash

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

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

… 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!