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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.
My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some people can get angry about".
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.
Yes. But also, lay users are not nearly as dumb/incompetent as UX designers allege when they rationalize removing features to "simplify things."
Not a UX designer, but having supported systems for decades I don't agree with your statement. If you got the system down to a single button that said 'Do' the user would still somehow screw it up.
And the correct response to this knowledge is to not try to optimize for the user that will screw anything up.
This only depends on how much money they have. If dumb users pay the most, then businesses will optimize for them.
Have worked on a help desk. Dialog boxes are close to this UI and nobody read them, come to think of it power users don't tend to either.
It's simple, when you really think about it. Just remove the user. All such pebkac and id-10t errors immediately resolved.
>Just remove the user.
Clawbot: I understand what you need, drones dispatched.
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?
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...
> 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"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.
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?)
> 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.
doesn't even need to be a wiki, because programs should contain their own help files! Like how commandline programs are encouraged (by command arg parsing libraries) to include the documentation in the very code that parses it.
Whoever that added those config option should also document it, preferably right in the code so that automatic generation of docs for the UI is possible (and ensures that it matches the version you're using).
I blame mobile, always, but it seems like software makers have become resistant (if not adversarial) to designing for PC, and also for users.
While adding tooltips or references to about:config could be a community project, I anticipate friction based on nothing more than than the seeming reluctance to implement community feedback over internal or consortium interests.
The toolbar has a "Customize toolbar" GUI screen that lets you add, remove and reorder elements. Maybe something similar could be done for context menus, including new entries added by extensions.
Have you ever right-clicked on the toolbar and chosen "Customize Toolbar..." ?
Something like that.
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.
Measure usage, and dim the unused menu items over time... or bold the ones the user selects the most.
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.
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.
Kinda, but if something can be built as an extension, it probably should be. It proves what you can do with the APIs, proves it can be replaced / forked by other people, and ensures a consistent level of isolation by default.
And if it can't... often it's worth asking if it should be possible.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.
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.
> It's sure hard to make everyone happy.
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.In the smartphone world it's the same until it's not https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=PhgMQ_cDkR7vMQfC
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...
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.
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.
I have never used any of those in a right click context menu in my entire 20 years of using Firefox
> 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.
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Which shareholders?
Mozilla does not have shareholders
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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".
Or you could do like Vivaldi, and have every menu configurable :)
Which adds more UI to control the feature as well, which someone will find ugly and unnecessary.
yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs tweaks.
To each their own; glad it's an option :)
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
TFA pretty much summed it up with:
Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped
You can please some of the people, some of the time.
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.
Maybe what the author is saying is that Firefox should make it much easier to configure these "options".
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.
Yes, I for one love all the options... dont hide menus from me, I have a big screen.
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.
And then the professional never uses it anyway because he knows all the shortcut keys!
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
>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
> 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
>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?
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.
> 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.
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?
Indeed both the "..." and "disabling over removing" were in the windows 95 UI manual
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. :)
Eh, they were definitely from Xerox (so it would be unclear since that both Windows and the Mac System Software derived some of their UI elements from Xerox experiments)
The Alto? I don't think that's accurate. Only 2000 devices ever shipped, and I used one at my parent's workplace back in the day. But I would have been far too young to remember that detail.
It may well have been kicking around PARC before Jobs made the deal with Xerox. But I can't find any images that show either of those UI elements, pre-Lisa.
Also macOS in its various guises, for decades.
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...
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.
Intuitive equals familar — Jef Raskin https://doi.org/10.1145/182987.584629
"The only intuitive user interface is the nipple."
(usually attributed to Bruce Tognazzini)
Before tearing something down, ask why it was built.
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.
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."
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.
Did you really make a blog post to tell the world that you don't know some things? That's not usual. If that is true, the only conclusion is that you should learn those things, and I'm not sure what I am supposed to get from reading it.
I think, or at least the way it reads to me is that you believe Firefox devs are wrong. This is what it looks like you meant. You believe the "..." is wrong to be there, and it should be removed. Which I do not agree with, and in any case we should first consider the "..." conventional meaning and only then we can maybe get to the conclusion that it should be removed. That it should be removed because you don't know why it is there is not reasonable, not to me.
In my humble opinion you should reflect a bit more on what you actually meant to say by this and also other points in the post.
> The greyed out options have no point because 99.99% of the links I click are already clean.
Frankly that's nonsense. They obviously have a point, and the fact you disagree with the point is something completely different. Firefox isn't specifically made for you. I appreciate the greyed out options in general, it helps me know they are there and that they may become available under some conditions.
> Did you really make a blog post to tell the world that you don't know some things? That's not usual
You are focusing on 5 words out of a 1000-word post. Get a grip lol.
In a world of usual, I like to be unusual.
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.
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.
At first I was going to say that the opportunity to back out and the need for more input are identical: if the dialog consists only of a button to proceed and a button to back out, the user needs to choose one of those as input, and eliminating that need for input means eliminating the opportunity to back out.
But now I'm thinking that a need and an opportunity are very distinct. For example, browsers used to present a Save dialog during a download: was there a need for input? No, accepting the default filename works, and based on that, they no longer offer the opportunity to choose a filename. Thus, "..." indicates the opportunity, even if there is no true need.
In addition, if you consider a "Print" dialog, it would be conceivable that it only provides a print preview, but no further inputs, and has only command buttons "Print" and "Cancel". In that case, I still think the menu item should be "Print…" with an ellipsis, despite the lack of further input.
Conversely, you might conceivably have a command that requires additional input, but where the dialog box taking the input doesn't offer the option to cancel the operation. In that case, I would consider an ellipsis misleading, even though a lack of ellipsis might be confusing as well if the command doesn't make sense without additional input.
+1 This has been true for, what, 30 years?
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).
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.
Comment was deleted :(
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.
It was already there in the original Mac, and is probably older than that.
How would a user learn about this convention?
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.
It's strange, because they do know about:config....
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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
> 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
This isn't about per-window menu bars, though; it's about context menus. macOS still has those.
Fitts’s law for menu bars made sense on a 12” monitor back then, but not so much on today’s large displays.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
I'm staring at a few apps on Windows right now and none of them even have menu bars (Firefox, Outlook, Spotify, Notepad, etc).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Objecting to your reply is exactly why I made my original comment. It's the same thing as the cliche; "we can talk about who's turn it is to do the dishes; but first we need to talk about why you're so upset about it?", or the other "you might not shoot the messenger, but you also won't invite him to dinner".
You might not feel the vitriol is warranted for this specific example, but you tell anyone that they are wrong to feel the way they do, at your own peril.
Is it that big of a deal? IMO, no and I say that as someone who was pissed off by it too. But then again the straw the breaks the camel's back never does seem heavy.
But in context:
> every post is turned up to 11.
Everyone is being disrespected all the time, from every direction. Here, it feels like Firefox is doing it too. Every one is already at 11, Firefox added an AI button nobody wanted, with no (real) way to disable it. And we now have an 11.05 post. As everyone paying attention would expect.
>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.
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);
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not arguing for changing the behavior, but for changing the label. Safari uses “Download Linked File”, which makes much more sense.
And I'm arguing that this term is used in exactly that meaning everywhere and is the expected use of the word "link".
I disagree that this is standard usage. Saving a link is like saving a bookmark.
Random examples:
https://www.wikihow.com/Save-a-Link
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-save-a-link
https://superuser.com/questions/996482/how-do-i-save-a-link-...
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mwkwnzd0l4n
https://www.oreateai.com/blog/a-simple-guide-to-saving-links...
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.
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.
… 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!
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.
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.
Thanks for putting this into words better then I would. I was screaming discoverablity at my screen.
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.
> 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.)
You can add a screenshot button to the toolbar from the "Customise Toolbar" screen, does the exact same thing as that context menu item.
By pressing the context-menu key when the element is selected in DevTools.
Ctrl-shift-s
You can also put a tiny camera icon in the tool bar and take a screenshot by clicking on that.
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.
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.
That one gets used a lot when someone leaves their laptop unlocked at college.
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?
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.
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.
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.
interestingly, I have these options in Firefox
I think the above comment meant that he misses those Firefox options when he uses other applications.
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.
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.
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;
}
(… 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
He says he highlighted some text then right clicked on an image to make it show as many items as possible.
I wish they had an always up to date guide on what each about:config option does.
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.
> It isn't even consistent about Pixels vs Px.
px is the CSS unit, device pixels aren't.
Good to know it has some logic to it, thanks for the clarification
“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 ...
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.
I wonder when was the last time any user used the "Email image" feature.
Intentionally? I've only ever "used" it when trying to copy a link to an image.
These prefs - and many others - can be placed in a user.js file: https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
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).
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
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?
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...
> 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?
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.
I see, I've also wondered why Firefox doesn't allow configuration of search providers in the context menu or allows multiple one.
> 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
>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)
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.
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.
It's gleaned from my locale. .hu is irrelevant; my alternative keyboard on my system is Polish
Interesting. I’ve never been to Poland and yet Polish the default second option in a ton of places for me. No clue why.
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.
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.
I don't care about the tone or any inconsistencies, it's a good list.
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.
Comment was deleted :(
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
How would it know?
Have you heard of machine learning?
If you put machine learning into the loading of a right click menu, I want you to step on a Lego barefoot immediately afterward.
Right click menus should be instant. No fade in. No animation. No spinner. And certainly not any machine learning calls.
Have you heard of async? You can get instant menu with a delayed menu item
Sure. If I select the word “Gift”, how much work does it need to decide whether it's English? How much more context does it need, and where does it get it? What if it guesses wrong and doesn't show the translation button?
Is there a way to disable Ctrl+Shift+C yet? That's my only longstanding complaint in Firefox.
Yes. It's in about:keyboard.
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.
The way sidebery let's you customize it's right click menu seems to be the right way to go about it
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
I think Firefox’s “shift + right click” to bypass context menu blocking should be adopted by all browsers.
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.
Mozilla really needs to trim this menu down by default. Who needs "Print selection" in this day and age?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There are actually eight dividers.
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)
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??
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?
It's still more useful than the "Set as desktop background" entry.
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.
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.
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.
i switched to waterfox last week and the context menu is better from the get-go. and no AI either.
[dead]
[dead]
just use a gecko fork without the AI loael
librewolf is great
loael
i see the author has a small vocabulary.
> 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.
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.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code