Firefox Community Forum

My elderly mother has twice (in the last month alone!) been scammed by selecting the first thing that comes along in a Google search. I realize this is simply never going to change, and I need to take steps to prevent her from ever seeing any sponsored results of any kind, or any kind of address bar autocomplete suggestion.

I have taken several dozen hours of my personal time this past month to repair the damage from her first scam experience (that I know about!), and today's incident made me realize that I have to do much more customization of her browser than I previously imagined. When I told her to never fully trust a Google search, her reply was "but I used Firefox!", and that told me everything I needed to know. It simply cannot be left to her understanding of the internet.

The intended setup is an iPad and a Win11 laptop. I would like to set up Firefox so that the address bar is nothing but an address bar without any kind of autocomplete at all. Is this even possible?

Also, I obviously can't filter every scam known to man, but I would like to specifically block the kind of pop-ups and ads that scammers use. What is a good strategy for this specific purpose? I don't care about legitimate marketing ads, even though they're annoying to me personally.

I was happily typing along and noticed both a typo and the fact that the typo was NOT underlined in red squiggles. Hmmmm, I thought.

Fiddling around, I discovered an option on right-click that allowed Me to turn on spellcheck. Now, every time I type in an email or forum, on Twitter, anywhere, I have to right-click to be sure of My spelling.

Thus began My efforts to find how to set the button to be on by default... Finding none led Me to "Help," which a search of the term "spellcheck default" led Me to a zero in returns. Sure, there were discussions with those terms, but I could not prowl them all looking for the method of setting spellcheck to be on by default. The first few pages yielded nothing...

So if You would please, direct Me to that function. [smile]

Thank You.

I've just updated to Firefox 125 and now, when I start to type in the URL bar and get my suggestion dropdown of previously visited pages, I no longer can see the actual url for each entry. All I see is the top level name for each entry.

This is not helpful, as I may have perviously visited a number of pages on that site and the information shown does not give me a way to differentiate sufficiently between those pages.

How can I get the exact url displayed on the suggestions dropdown.

How can I get those top level descriptions NOT displayed, so that only the urls are shown?

What's the best way to set up Startpage private search in Firefox? Should I manually change the settings or install the extension? Also, it seems like Firefox could improve the process for us.

Hi there - Every website seems to come up in English, ie Firefox seems to be translating other languages automatically. (My version is Firefox for Mac 123.01 64-bit.) I am wondering how I can prevent automatic translation of websites. I have had a look in preferences etc, but I do not see anything there to prevent automatic translation. Any help gratefully received! Many thanks :-)

Hello, in past versions of Firefox, I was able to follow the steps on this page to set a custom HTML file on my PC as my home page for new tabs: https://peterries.net/blog/firefox-ubuntu-local-file/

I have Firefox 107.0.1 now and it's not happening. When I open the browser from scratch, I see my custom home page file. But when I open a new tab, I just see a blank screen. If I then click the Home icon on the toolbar, I do see my custom HTML page, but I don't want to have to click that button for each new tab.

Right now, in my settings, I have the URL to the page set as the custom URL for the HTML fiile, like this:

file:///home/peter/Documents/homepage/peter-home-homepage.html

That works. And I also have followed the steps on that blog post to customize my /usr/lib/firefox/autoconfig.cfg and my ../firefox/defalults/pref/autoconfig.js files. That's no longer working.

Did something in a recent version change? Is this no longer supported? Thanks for any ideas!

Hi All,

I'm trying to set the border color for my url & search bars to gray when non-focused, and blue when receiving the focus.

The following code works for the search bar, but the url bar is receiving a separate blue border around the gray border, instead of changing the color from gray to blue.

Can someone suggest how I might set the url bar to blue (just a single border, not the double it has now), both when it has focus and when it's expanded?

Thank you!

/* set non-focused url & search bars to gray border */
#urlbar > #urlbar-background, #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] > #urlbar-background, #searchbar { border: 1px solid #a1a6b5 !important; outline: none !important; border-radius: 0px !important; }

/* set focused search bar to blue border */
#urlbar-background, #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] > #urlbar-background:focus-within, #searchbar:focus-within { border: 1px solid #0078d7 !important; }

/* set focused url bar to blue border */
#urlbar-background, #urlbar[breakout][breakout-extend] > #urlbar-background:focus-within, #urlbar:focus-within { border: 1px solid #0078d7 !important; }

Is there any way to make Firefox show the "back", "forward", "reload", "bookmark" buttons that are shown in the default context menu when right clicking a web page also in the context menu that is shown when right clicking an image?

I think those buttons should always be included in all context menus opened for a web page, no matter if you happen to click on the background, on selected text, on an image or a link because.

It is so frustrating having to open the context menu multiple times to find a location where the default context menu is opened instead of the specific ones for selected texts, images, links etc.

Thanks!

After the latest update (124.0.2), two of my add-ons (Tapermonkey and Youtube Redux) are not working, even though Firefox says they're enabled, and it is giving no indication that the add-ons aren't working, no pop-ups to enable some permission for these extensions. Both of them reformat the layout of websites to make them more usable, and using sites without them is basically impossible for me. I have tried:

• Restarting Firefox
• Disabling the add-ons, refreshing, enabling the add-ons, and refreshing again
• Checking for add-on updates (everything is updated)
• Deleting and reinstalling the add-ons
• Restarting my computer
• Checking the permissions in the extension menu
• Turning off all other extensions except for one of the ones with issues
• Reading through the FAQs and help pages and following the instructions on some of them

Nothing has worked. Every time I reload one of the sites affected by this to check if it's finally worked, the site takes a very long time to load. Since these add-ons are for different websites and both aren't working, I know that the problem is not with the sites themselves. Thank you.

Any advice returned by Google seems to be obsolete or only worked perhaps in older versions of Firefox. The main idea of using userChrome.css to override the default styles for Reader View does not seem to work. My userChrome.css file does work on other items though (like removing the sidebar width restriction).

Whatever advice I find via Google perhaps cites outdated CSS selectors, but current selectors do not seem to be documented anywhere by Mozilla. Moreover, I cannot find any file on my local drive named aboutReader.css when using find or grep commands in bash, those this file name is alluded to when viewing a page in Reader View and then in turn viewing source on that transformed page.

Moreover, addons that would allow me to change the colors seem to be restricted in Reader View.

It does seem like something has changed in recent Firefox updates but I can't remember when I last saw, for instance, links in dark mode Reader View that were still pink (whereas now they are blue, and impossibly dark to see, especially when you are disabling as much blue light as possible through your operating system). I need a higher contrast color for links in dark mode Reader View so I can actually see them.

I can alternatively use the Tranquility Reader addon and have custom colors, but A) that addon does not work with the Automatic Reader View addon, whereby I can always have various sites appear in some sort of "reader view" whether the native one or Tranquility Reader, and B) hitting refresh when in Reader View will defeat some soft paywalls but this does not work with, e.g., Tranquility Reader, so I still would prefer to be able to custom colors in the native Reader View feature, rather than rely on an addon.

1. Where are the current styles for Reader View even documented? 2. Is overriding them now restricted? 3. Why did the link color change from pink to blue in newer versions of Firefox (this is a terrible accessibility bug)? 4 .Where is the alluded to aboutReader.css stylesheet actually stored on my computer (it doesn't seem to be a file on the filesystem in the Firefox profiles folder, it seems more like it is embedded in the Firefox binary/executable)? 5. Will Firefox settings ever allow us to set colors specifically for Reader View (I don't mean the override settings for all web pages, particularly web pages not being rendered in Reader View ... that setting does not help in Reader View, nor would it be the desired preference for pages not in Reader View)?

Thank you.

Hello!

I am a heavy user of Firefox: daily & around 8 hours a day.

I usually use alt+shift+left/right-arrow to select a few words to the right / to the left. With the latest update (mandatory because this is a work-administered) laptop, the new behavior is that tabs are changed.

I want any solution to revert this to standard (past) behavior (preferably not an extension). Looked around in about:config but could not find anything to toggle on/off.

This is highly annoying as I've had this workflow for literally years. Even opening this ticket I encountered the issue more than 3 times as I was phrasing the message and had to delete & rewrite some stuff while also have other tabs open in the same Firefox window.

Would highly appreciate your timely response!

Thanks a lot! -- John

When reloading a page, or navigating to a new page, the default Stop icon momentarily appears over my own Reload icon, and the default Reload icon also appears over my Stop icon.

Please see attached image and animation.

Any idea if this is a minor bug?

Below is my code to split the Reload button into Reload & Stop buttons, then to add text to the navigation buttons, and finally to add icons to the navigation buttons.

This anomaly happens whether or not I split the Reload & Stop buttons. With just a single Reload button, I'm also seeing the default Reload icon appear over my own.

Thank you.

/* ---------- SPLIT RELOAD BUTTON INTO RELOAD & STOP ------------- */

#reload-button, #stop-button {
   display: inherit !important; 
} 

#reload-button > .toolbarbutton-icon {
  -moz-appearance: none !important; 
}

/* ------------ ADD TEXT LABELS TO NAVIGATION TOOLBAR BUTTONS --------------- */

/* Shows both icon and label for toolbarbuttons */

toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label]{
  flex-direction: column;
  align-items: center !important;
}

toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label]:not([disabled]):hover{ background-color: var(--toolbarbutton-hover-background) !important; }

toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label] > .toolbarbutton-icon,
toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label] > .toolbarbutton-badge-stack{
  padding: var(--toolbarbutton-inner-padding) !important;
  padding-bottom: 0px !important;
  height: calc(var(--toolbarbutton-inner-padding) + 16px) !important;
  border: none !important;
  background-color: transparent !important;
  box-shadow: none !important;
}

toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label] > .toolbarbutton-text {
  display: flex !important;
  min-height: 16px !important;
  padding-top: 3px !important;
  padding-bottom: 6px !important;
  background-color: transparent !important;
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 9ch; /* changes space between buttons */
}
toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label] > .toolbarbutton-text::before{
  margin-inline: auto;
 }
:root:not([uidensity="compact"]) toolbar .toolbarbutton-1[label] > .toolbarbutton-text{ padding: 2px !important; }

/* ------------ ADD CUSTOM ICONS TO NAVIGATION TOOLBAR BUTTONS ----------- */

#back-button {
   list-style-image: url("image/back.png") !important;
   padding-top: 8px !important;
}
#back-button image{
   max-height: 16px !important; 
   max-width: 16px !important;
   padding: 0px !important;
   margin-bottom: 3px !important;
}
#forward-button {
   list-style-image: url("image/forward.png") !important;
   padding-top: 8px !important;
}
#forward-button image{
   max-height: 16px !important; 
   max-width: 16px !important;
   padding: 0px !important;
   margin-bottom: 3px !important;
}
#reload-button {
   list-style-image: url("image/reload.png") !important;
   padding-top: 8px !important;
}
#reload-button image{
   max-height: 16px !important; 
   max-width: 16px !important;
   padding: 0px !important;
   margin-bottom: 3px !important;
}
#stop-button {
   list-style-image: url("image/stop.png") !important;
   padding-top: 8px !important;
}
#stop-button image{
   max-height: 16px !important; 
   max-width: 16px !important;
   padding: 0px !important;
   margin-bottom: 3px !important;
}
#print-button {
   list-style-image: url("image/print.png") !important;
   padding-top: 8px !important;
}
#print-button image{
   max-height: 16px !important; 
   max-width: 16px !important;
   padding: 0px !important;
   margin-bottom: 3px !important;
}
#home-button {
   list-style-image: url("image/home.png") !important;
   padding-top: 8px !important;
}
#home-button image{
   max-height: 16px !important; 
   max-width: 16px !important;
   padding: 0px !important;
   margin-bottom: 3px !important;
}

I am using Firefox 126.0 under Windows 10.

I am trying to add search engines to the search toolbar. (Just to be clear, this is the search box that appears below the address bar, not the address bar itself.)

I followed the instructions here. That worked fine for Wikipedia, Google Maps and YouTube. Then I tried to add Amazon UK. The Amazon icon is now present in the search box, but when I select it, I see this message:

Firefox could not download the search plugin from: https://d2lo25i6d3q8zm.cloudfront.net/browser-plugins/AmazonSearchSuggestionsOSD.Firefox.xml

I have no idea what this means or what to do about it.

(I also tried adding it from Settings > Search > Search Shortcuts, but Amazon does not appear on that list of search engines [unlike on my other computer]. I clicked "Find more search engines", but that brought up a list of 5,192 extensions, most of which seemed not be related to searching.)

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

Mike

How do I get the + sign back on my tabs? After latest update I can only close tabs instead of opening new tab, and I am talking about after opening several tabs. When I have seven tab open, I have to do ctrl+t to open new tab instead of just clicking on the + sign that use to be at end of tabs. Yes, I do use custom settings. This happened before but I was able to fix by going to tabs under about:config, but it seems the setting is no longer there.

I'm trying to move away from using Google, so I swapped to Duckduckgo and removed Google as a default search. However, "Search with Google" is still appearing in my search suggestions bar with a pin icon in the corner, and I can't figure out how to remove it. Does anyone know how to do this?

One quality of life thing I really miss after switching from Chrome is the option to "Goto ip" when you highlight and right click on a local ip address.

I do a lot or networking and am going to local ip addresses all the time (ie 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.20.15). When I highlight an address in the local ranges in Chrome it gives the "Goto" option, but Firefox always offers "Search Google for"

I really miss this option and unfortunately all my searching has not yield a solution since search engines cant quite make sense of my requests.

Hopefully someone here can nail something down.

Thanks!

Is there a way to create a new keyboard shortcut to copy current tab URL?

I've been using Arc to try some of their features, and what I miss the most is the hability to copy current URL to share without touching the mouse.

For the past few months every restart of Firefox disables LastPass. I did NOT have this problem previously. The version of LastPass is current (no updates found). I can go to Add-ons and the toggle is set to "on" but the icon in the menu bar is black. If I click the toggle off, then back on, LastPass comes on just fine. Why is Firefox disabling something that Add-ons says is loaded? VERY strange. Does NOT happen in Chrome. Thanks for any assistance. PITB!!!

Hello,

We are adding accessibility features to the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5 Linux distribution based on Debian 12, and we would like to use the reading mode included in Firefox to enable smoother voice reading for visually impaired people.

Currently we are going to use the Svox Pico and eSpeak speech synthesis at the same time because in SVox Pico we do not have all the voices we need for our possible users, particularly Portuguese.

We have found how to make the synthesis used by Firefox's reading mode be SVox Pico by default instead of eSpeak, however this requires a modification in the /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf file.

To do this, simply put the default pico synthesis in this file:

DefaultModule pico

But this causes problems with other software that we intend to use.

We found how to make all the voices of a speech synthesis appear in the Firefox playback menu by going to about:config and doing a search for the word "narrate":

Option narrate

On the other hand, we cannot find how to modify the "narrate.voice" option to tell it to default to pico speech synthesis instead of eSpeak synthesis which is the first synthesis loaded by speech-dispatcher, because we must keep eSpeak as the first synthesis loaded and do not put a default synthesis in speechd.conf to maintain compatibility with software that we wish to use.

Do you have any tips or a manual that explains the possible options for the "narrate.voice" option?

Thanks in advance for your help.

For many years I have used the ability to set shortcuts to website on the Firefox home tab, using the method given at: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-items-on-firefox-new-tab-page#w_pin-unpin-or-remove-a-shortcut.

However, today, when I try to edit a shortcut link, I do not get the 3 dots menu by right clicking on a shortcut tile.

Is this a recent change, a bug, an issue with my installation (which has been stable for many years)?

How can I get back the functionality back?

I am using Firefox 127.0 (64 bit) on Windows (Windows 11, all up to date).