Discussion
Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
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.
peterspath: 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.
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
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.
jadar: i see the author has a small vocabulary.
mantra2: I wish they had an always up to date guide on what each about:config option does.
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.
paulddraper: +1 This has been true for, what, 30 years?
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.
NoboruWataya: My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some people can get angry about".
mantra2: You can please some of the people, some of the time.
anonym29: just use a gecko fork without the AI loaellibrewolf is great
mmsc: loael
alpaca128: 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.
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.)
wackget: These prefs - and many others - can be placed in a user.js file: https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
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.
deathanatos: > 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.)
w0m: yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs tweaks.To each their own; glad it's an option :)
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.
olivia-banks: 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: It's gleaned from my locale. .hu is irrelevant; my alternative keyboard on my system is Polish
SllX: 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.
silverwind: Mozilla really needs to trim this menu down by default. Who needs "Print selection" in this day and age?
CamperBob2: 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.
EvilTerran: You can add a screenshot button to the toolbar from the "Customise Toolbar" screen, does the exact same thing as that context menu item.
autoexec: How about Firefox just not fill their context menu with bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for like google lens and makes 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.
ndespres: 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?
pdntspa: 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 areBlog first, ask questions later? It's like c'mon man, have at least a little bit of curiosity...
eikenberry: 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.
tcfhgj: interestingly, I have these options in Firefox
OkayPhysicist: I think the above comment meant that he misses those Firefox options when he uses other applications.
mikkupikku: 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.
saghm: 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: 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: > Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by defaultYou 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"
john_strinlai: >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
kyusan0: 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.
Snortibartfast: 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".
drecked: 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: 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.
darkwater: 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.
godelski: 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?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?)
OkayPhysicist: 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.
grayhatter: 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.
tim-kt: 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
Krssst: 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?
CamperBob2: 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.
Joshuas_Mom: Pretending someone is tech-illiterate because they missed one ancient UI convention from the 90s is absolutely laughable. I've known the author for years, and his technical depth runs circles around this kind of petty nitpicking. Abusing the flag button to bury an entire article over a menu ellipsis isn't just peak pedantry — it's cowardly gatekeeping that actively makes this forum worse. And before you get on your high horse to police someone else's 'literacy,' you might want to scrub your own post history. It hardly reads like the work of a genius. Next time, try formulating an actual argument against the substance of the article instead of mashing the censor button.
autoexec: 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: 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.)
Krastan: He says he highlighted some text then right clicked on an image to make it show as many items as possible.
grayhatter: 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...
agwa: 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.
layer8: > 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.
godelski: > 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=5zUndMfMIncAt 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.
reciprocity: 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.
LikeBeans: 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...
layer8: Fitts’s law for menu bars made sense on a 12” monitor back then, but not so much on today’s large displays.
CobrastanJorji: > 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.
lifis: 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
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!
the_bear: 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.
devmor: 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.
dwoldrich: 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.
