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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

… 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!

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.)

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

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

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?

>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)

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.

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".

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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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??

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.

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.

just use a gecko fork without the AI loael

librewolf is great

[dead]

> 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.

i see the author has a small vocabulary.

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.