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

  > 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

It's gleaned from my locale. .hu is irrelevant; my alternative keyboard on my system is Polish

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?

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.

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 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.

+1 This has been true for, what, 30 years?

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...

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.

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

Fitts’s law for menu bars made sense on a 12” monitor back then, but not so much on today’s large displays.

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.

loael

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting. I’ve never been to Poland and yet Polish the default second option in a ton of places for me. No clue why.

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.

> 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed both the "..." and "disabling over removing" were in the windows 95 UI manual

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...

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."

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.

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.

One day, all of you LLM posters will get what you deserve.

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

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

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

Also macOS in its various guises, for decades.

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. :)

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.

I'm staring at a few apps on Windows right now and none of them even have menu bars (Firefox, Outlook, Spotify, Notepad, etc).

You can add a screenshot button to the toolbar from the "Customise Toolbar" screen, does the exact same thing as that context menu item.

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?

That one gets used a lot when someone leaves their laptop unlocked at college.

By pressing the context-menu key when the element is selected in DevTools.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> It isn't even consistent about Pixels vs Px.

px is the CSS unit, device pixels aren't.

Ctrl-shift-s

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

interestingly, I have these options in Firefox

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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"

> 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.

Good to know it has some logic to it, thanks for the clarification

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.

You can also put a tiny camera icon in the tool bar and take a screenshot by clicking on that.

I think the above comment meant that he misses those Firefox options when he uses other applications.

_Intuitive equals familar_ — Jef Raskin https://doi.org/10.1145/182987.584629

I’m not arguing for changing the behavior, but for changing the label. Safari uses “Download Linked File”, which makes much more sense.

"The only intuitive user interface is the nipple."

(usually attributed to Bruce Tognazzini)

And I'm arguing that this term is used in exactly that meaning everywhere and is the expected use of the word "link".