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.

The "..." convention is used when menu options open a dialog box rather than just immediately doing the action.

> 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

  “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 ...

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 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.

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).

A lot of software (Github, Okta, etc. etc.) will just delete portions of their UI, usually because you don't have permission to access it, or even just some of it. So, if you google "how do I do X?" the AI — assuming it gets it right at all — will tell you to click on UI that doesn't exist. Even if you then scroll to the organic docs, those will also have you click UI that does not exist.

A greyed-out item gives you the affordance of knowing that that feature / path exists, even if it's not available right here, right now. Truly good UI would also give me an affordance of knowing why (e.g., a tooltip saying "to access blah, you need permission blah"), but that's just asking for the moon, I know.

But when you're staring at docs referencing a non-existence menu item: is it because I lack a permission? What permission? Or perhaps the docs are just out of date? — you don't know!

The 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.

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

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.)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-tooltip...

Actually an image which is also a link for extra buttons (typical wikipedia image AFAICT)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391

Love that firefox offers so much control, despite the questionable defaults.

Is there a technical reason for this that Polish is defaulted to more often than not? Or is this just a me thing.

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.

[1] I exaggerate a bit, sometimes I use uBlock Origin's "block element".

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 can pick out the button i want instantly. i don't have to navigate multiple buttons to do anything

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.