Tools: Making Firefox's Right-click Not Suck With About:config 2026

On a fresh installation of Firefox on MacOS, right-clicking an image while some text on the page is highlighted (to show as many buttons as possible) looks like so:

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), 7 dividers, 2 submenus; because a single row for “Ask an AI Chatbot” wasn’t enough, they just had to make another submenu. Amazing.

The “Inspect Accessibility Properties” button was added because I opened the DevTools (Inspector) once. It’s not obvious how to actually disable it ever again. Why am I shown “Copy Clean Link” if there is no clean link (or the link is already clean)? The same goes for “Copy Clean Link to Highlight”. Why can’t I make it so it always defaults to the “clean link” no matter what (and get rid of “Copy Link” completely, instead)? “Ask an AI Chatbot”? No, fuck you.

The rest? Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped, with no authoritative selection of what users actually care about – and making it completely non-obvious how to disable the useless shit here.

Enough venting, let’s clean this all up. The following settings in about:config can be used to disable a ton of these useless right-click menu buttons. Note, some of them actually disable other functionality, so choose wisely. We can set the following to false:

Great, much better, we’re down from 26 buttons to just 15. Here’s what it looks like when you right-click on a page and when you right-click a link:

We still have the following useless buttons though:

Why do all of the above have ...? No clue (edit: according to this, “it means that more information is required to complete the task (e.g. requesting the filename for saving a file)”. But the real bad news is that we can’t get rid of these things by simply toggling some option in about:config.

Despite the browser only being used in one language, there is no way to get rid of the “Languages” menu there. It’s possible to get rid of “Check Spelling” by completely disabling spellcheck, but that’s a useful feature for me, so I don’t.

Those remaining useless buttons can only be removed by creating a custom userChrome.css. I’ll cover how to do that in my next post.

Source: HackerNews