[agwa]

In an alternative timeline, Firefox makes their context menu really short and someone writes a blog post ranting about how it deprives functionality from power users.

In fact, I've read several such rants about Firefox removing functionality from other parts of their UI.

It's sure hard to make everyone happy.

[NoboruWataya]

My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some people can get angry about".

[wolvoleo]

I sure hated it when windows 11 dumbed down the explorer context menu. Lots of stuff I used to do a lot now took 2 clicks instead of one.

Luckily it can simply be switched off.

[mikkupikku]

I really wish they'd just make it easily customizable. I don't care if lay-users might mess it up and get confused, such users abandoned Firefox years ago anyway.

[bityard]

Yes. But also, lay users are not nearly as dumb/incompetent as UX designers allege when they rationalize removing features to "simplify things."

[pixl97]

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.

[cwillu]

And the correct response to this knowledge is to not try to optimize for the user that will screw anything up.

[pixl97]

This only depends on how much money they have. If dumb users pay the most, then businesses will optimize for them.

[goodmythical]

It's simple, when you really think about it. Just remove the user. All such pebkac and id-10t errors immediately resolved.

[pixl97]

>Just remove the user.

Clawbot: I understand what you need, drones dispatched.

[stuaxo]

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.

[saghm]

Honestly, "go into about:config and flip some switches to remove stuff" is about as easy as I could imagine for allowing people to customize it. What would you suggest?

[lamontcg]

Yeah, if you turn it all into buttons and settings in the actual settings menus, someone else is going to post a long rant about how the settings menus have a million confusing options that nobody uses...

Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-problems-and-solutions rant...

[mmsc]

> Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by 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"

[pavon]

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.

[godelski]

I'd suggest that they make it clearer what the user actually changed, in about:config, and show the defaults. If I click that button "Show only modified settings" I see a lot of things, mostly options that I set from the normal settings. I mean "browser.download.lastDir" should be in practically everyone's.

So there's a lot of noise and resetting things can be unclear. Especially given that when you reinstall things not all uninstalls clear out settings. It could definitely help if the about:config page tells you about the user.js file and directs you to more information. Why doesn't editing things in about:config generate the user.js file? 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?)

[chii]

> 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).

[washadjeffmad]

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.

[Maken]

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.

[Izkata]

Have you ever right-clicked on the toolbar and chosen "Customize Toolbar..." ?

Something like that.

[weaksauce]

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.

[Tempest1981]

Measure usage, and dim the unused menu items over time... or bold the ones the user selects the most.

[wtallis]

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.

[ziml77]

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.

[Groxx]

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.

[wtallis]

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.

[bluebarbet]

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.

[terminalshort]

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.

[mikkupikku]

Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.

[wtallis]

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.

[grayhatter]

This isn't as simple as making everyone happy.

It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!!

I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone, it's about treating users with respect, and not jumping on the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy violating... From the privacy focused browser...

[terminalshort]

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.

[agwa]

The blog post is also complaining about the options to create a screenshot, copy a link to a text fragment, copy a link without trackers, debug accessibility issues, auto-fill a form, and even to print the page.

Also, Mozilla Corporation's sole "shareholder" is the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.

[brynnbee]

I have never used any of those in a right click context menu in my entire 20 years of using Firefox

[Ukv]

> 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.

[eipi10_hn]

Which shareholders?

[iknowstuff]

Mozilla does not have shareholders

[godelski]

  > It's sure hard to make everyone happy.

I definitely think this is a hard task and it's pretty apparent with Firefox. I mean no matter what they do people are going to be very vocal and upset about it.

But to talk more generally, I think finding the balance of what options to expose to normal users and then how to expose things to power users is quite challenging. I think a big mistake people make is to just ignore power users and act like that just because they're a small percentage of users that they aren't important[0].

I think what makes computers so successful is the fact that computers aren't really a product designed "for everyone," instead, they're built as environments that can be turned into a thing that anyone needs. Which is why your power users become important and in a way, why this balance is hard to strike because in some sense every user is a power user. Nobody has the same programs installed on their computers, nobody has the same apps installed on their phones, each and every device is unique. You give them the power to make it their own, and that's the only way you can truly build something that works for everyone.

This is why I think computers are magic! But I think we've lost this idea. We've been regressing to the mean. The problem is when you create something for everybody you end up making something for nobody.

[0] I think Jack Conte (Patreon/Pomplamoose) explains it well here. It's the subset that is passionate that are often your greatest ally. No matter what you sell, most of the money comes from a small subset of buyers. The same is true with whatever metric we look at. As a musician a small subset of listeners are the ones that introduce you to the most people, buy the most merch, and all that that makes you successful. It's not the average "user" but the "power user". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=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.

[adithyassekhar]

In the smartphone world it's the same until it's not https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=PhgMQ_cDkR7vMQfC

[6510]

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.

[Snortibartfast]

Or you could do like Vivaldi, and have every menu configurable :)

[darkwater]

Which adds more UI to control the feature as well, which someone will find ugly and unnecessary.

[Groxx]

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".

[w0m]

yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs tweaks.

To each their own; glad it's an option :)

[eviks]

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

[pseudohadamard]

TFA pretty much summed it up with:

  Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped

And that's what it is, we'll just use the right-click menu as a garbage dump for every feature we've added. I've currently got my right-click menu down to eight entries, of which four are extensions I added (NoScript, DownThemAll, etc), and the four built-in ones are things I've never, ever used in 20+ years as a Firefox user. I'm also running RightLinks which turns right clicks on a link into "Open in New Tab", which is what I want to do, oh, approximately 100% of the time I right-click on a link (for the epsilon times I don't want to do that you can override with Ctrl-Click to get the original menu back). Its actually painful watching users who haven't overridden the Firefox builtins use right-click, "right-click, scroll, scroll, pause to check, scroll, click".

[mantra2]

You can please some of the people, some of the time.

[weaksauce]

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.

[NoSalt]

Maybe what the author is saying is that Firefox should make it much easier to configure these "options".

[heraldgeezer]

Yes, I for one love all the options... dont hide menus from me, I have a big screen.

[somat]

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.

[terminalshort]

And then the professional never uses it anyway because he knows all the shortcut keys!

[elxr]

> 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.

[somat]

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.

[behringer]

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!

[autoexec]

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.

[OkayPhysicist]

It literally already is fully customizable. between userChrome, about:config, and extensions, you can do literally anything you like to your right click menu on Firefox.

[autoexec]

I'd argue that you shouldn't need third party add-ons plus modifications to both userChrome and about:config to do it, so it could be easier. A "Customize Context Menu" under Edit would be nice and easy for even regular users to discover and take advantage of.

[sfink]

Why is my Edit menu so long? What is this "Customize Context Menu" thing that I never use, or will use at most once a year?

Just kidding, but it does illustrate that there's always a tradeoff with these things. (I would like to have the ability to customize the context menu too, fwiw, though it's not as straightforward as the other customizable bits of UI since the context menu is, well, contextual.)

[grayhatter]

about:config where you need a search engine to find all the key strings does not count as easy in this context. And it's unreasonable to pretend it is.

[john_strinlai]

>makes it fully/easily customizable so that most users are happy [...] It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy.

considering that it is already fully customizable, yet you are still complaining about it, i dont think so

[autoexec]

> 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

[john_strinlai]

>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?

[autoexec]

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.