Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
joshua.hu
joshua.hu
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.
Luckily it can simply be switched off.
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.
Neovim users disagree.
no, it fits.
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.
And if it can't... often it's worth asking if it should be possible.
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...
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"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.
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?)
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).
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.
Something like that.
Clawbot: I understand what you need, drones dispatched.
To each their own; glad it's an option :)
It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy.
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.)
considering that it is already fully customizable, yet you are still complaining about it, i dont think so
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?
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.
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...
Also, Mozilla Corporation's sole "shareholder" is the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.
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.
> 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.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.
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
Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped
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".
The "..." convention is used when menu options open a dialog box rather than just immediately doing the action.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Just two of the things Microsoft copied successfully. :)
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.
Blog first, ask questions later? It's like c'mon man, have at least a little bit of curiosity...
(usually attributed to Bruce Tognazzini)
Also greyed out options have a point, they only seem "fucking useless" if you don't know it.
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."
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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 what NeXTSTEP did for application menus, along with right-click context menus (which MacOS X did keep).
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.
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.
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.
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
Hey what's with the jerky tone? Are we competing for dominance now? Was Steve Jobs a bad guy and so I am by mentioning him? He had good taste, and people aren't one-dimensional cartoon characters, you git.
> hundreds of items
Pedantry. The ellipsis items covers some categorized feature drill downs that don't get top billing, the sub menus others.
> This isn't the only alternative
Captain Obvious does it again ladies and gentlemen!
Many managers have to show engagement with their feature to be successful and would love to shove it in your face with a shiny button. See the copilot button getting added to every Microsoft Office product even if it's not integrated at all - shameful!
> It isn't very discoverable, there is no search
Thank goodness I can save face here, 'discoverable' is a binary quality: something either is or isn't discoverable and a browsable menu IS.
Plenty of vendors put a search on their Help menu. (It usually sucks, to be fair.) Jetbrains has an auto-completing action search that exposes practically every action the IDE can effect by their titles.
Wow, search CAN help, amazing insight! Why aren't you advising diplomats and statesmen?
Not everyone will understand the dilemma that UX designers have about surfacing their features without causing clutter and distraction, and I was trying to start a conversation about that.
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.
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.
They want more users, so logically it cannot be intentional. More generally, we cannot know others' intentions, so the speculation is always redundant.
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.
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);
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.
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...
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.)
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!
No, putting an explanation on the help article that this feature is only available to admins doesn't work. No one reads anything.
Unfortunately that one is not removable through about:config.
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.
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 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.
> [...] right-clicking an image while some text on the page is highlighted (to show as many buttons as possible) looks like so
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.
px is the CSS unit, device pixels aren't.
“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 ...
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).
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.
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.
Is there a technical reason for this that Polish is defaulted to more often than not? Or is this just a me thing.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-tooltip...
Huh, beside Google Maps, that's what the default context menu does in Firefox?
Actually an image which is also a link for extra buttons (typical wikipedia image AFAICT)
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.
Obviously, no issues with non-devs who would never use it disabling it.
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
Vivaldi browser desktop user (Settings → Appearance → Menu → Choose “Page” in the Menu Customization dropdown)
[1] I exaggerate a bit, sometimes I use uBlock Origin's "block element".
Mozilla kill when it moved from XUL to web extension. Mozilla is run by people who don't use Firefox nor care.
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.
To respond: Remember you just took Google software, changed skin, added more telemetry and spying eyes, and call it a browser.
Please consider reading.
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.
Right click menus should be instant. No fade in. No animation. No spinner. And certainly not any machine learning calls.
Be like TRON, fight for the user. Not the developer. Not the developer's politics or opinions, and certainly not for the computer itself. The user's wants are the #1 priority in a human-computer interaction.
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.
i can pick out the button i want instantly. i don't have to navigate multiple buttons to do anything
It's a thankless task - except by nontech browser users - to modify Fx's menus. Anybody remember the XUL-era addon 'Menu Editor'? So many years and so much effort to make it 'simple' for typical users to customize Menu Bar and context-menus; and always a target that refused to stay standard given Firefox version changes ALWAYS break something about the UI. Ultimately a valiant but unrewarded failure, no blame to the 'Menu Editor' developer(s) and userbase.
As the writer will learn, the 'best' way to UI changes current (and XUL) Firefox is via userChrome.js/.css -- which has also had troubled history, as waves of main-office Fx developers have been openly hostile to promoting and supporting is functionalities.
Love that firefox offers so much control, despite the questionable defaults.
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.
librewolf is great
Chef’s kiss.
Just make the goddamn browser fast, lightweight, and stable. Forget everything else.
Except spell check. Please god fix that too.