Another day, another Firefox tip!

I’ve been using Firefox for years, and I’ve had one minor (but annoying) problem for a long time now: when you go to save a bookmark, there’s a handy list of previously used folders. That way you can quickly choose a folder to save the bookmark, rather than click through the entire folder hierarchy.

Problem is, this list stopped updating about 5 years ago.  The issue followed me through several versions of Firefox, on both desktop and laptop. I could save a hundred bookmarks in some other folder, but this list of recent folders has looked exactly as shown above since 2016 or 2017. And it was super annoying, since I mostly only use bookmarks as a session-saving type system these days. I save each Firefox window in a folder called “Sessions”… which I always had to manually click to, since the folders shown above never updated.

But yes, there is a way to fix this:

1) Open a new tab in Firefox and enter “about: config” (without quotes) into the address bar. Click “Accept the Risk and Continue” when prompted.

2) Type (or paste) “devtools.chrome.enabled” into the search box, and when it appears, double-click it to change the value from FALSE to TRUE. Close the tab when done.

3) Click the hamburger menu in the upper-right of the window and click More Tools > Browser Console. A small window with a bunch of techo-gobbledygook will open:

4) Type (or paste) the following at the cursor on the bottom of this window:

await PlacesUtils.metadata.set(PlacesUIUtils.LAST_USED_FOLDERS_META_KEY,[]);

5) Restart Firefox. When you try to bookmark a page, the previous locations should now be empty, and will refill over time as you save to various folders.

Have you ever been to a website that won’t let you copy text? Like this page, for example? There are a few workarounds for this, especially with Firefox.

The easiest is to just click the “Reading Mode” icon in Firefox’s address bar:

This presents a simplified page with most of the ads and graphics stripped out. You can easily copy text now:

Another option uses uBlock Origin. uBlock is one of the most popular ad blocking extensions, and it’s available for Firefox, Chrome and Edge.  If you don’t use uBlock already, you probably should. In Firefox you can install it by clicking the hamburger icon in the upper right corner of a Firefox window and then “Add-ons and themes” and type “uBlock Origin” in the search bar. Make sure you install uBlock Origin and not plain old uBlock or any other variant. For other browsers, just go to its extensions site\store and install it from there.

In any case, if you click on the uBlock icon in the Firefox toolbar, you can click the “</>” icon to disable JavaScript, then click the “Reload page” icon just above it (the arrows in a circle):

Don’t forget to re-enable JavaScript when done! uBlock disables JavaScript on a per-domain basis, so while it shouldn’t affect other websites, it might affect some other aspect of the current site.

The inability to copy text is almost always done in JavaScript. So disabling JavaScript will almost always allow you to copy text. But digging through the settings in whichever browser you use can be a chore, and may require a restart of the browser.

There are plenty of Firefox and Chrome\Edge extensions that let you toggle JavaScript off and on, and they usually work. But it’s so rare that I come across this that I usually try Reading Mode first, and it that doesn’t work, disabling JavaScript via uBlock works about 99% of the time. If this happens to you all the time – maybe copying text from “protected” pages is what you do at work all day – then maybe one of those simple JavaScript togglers would work best for you. Most of these disable JavaScript within the browser, so don’t forget to turn it back on when done!

Firefox 97+ has introduced an annoying new “feature”: when you download a file – any file – the download progress meter pops-up when the download completes, whether you want it to or not. Perhaps the pop-up is helpful if you’re downloading a large file over a slow connection… but if you’re downloading a bunch of smaller image files it’s more annoying than helpful.

It’s pretty easy to stop the pop-up window. Note that the following procedure will ONLY disable the pop-up at completion: the other behavior of the download button on the toolbar is not affected:

– In the address bar, type about:config and press ENTER. Accept the warning message (the exact text varies by Firefox version) and click “Continue”.

– Type (or paste) browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel in the search box at the top of the window.

– The value for the entry should be set to TRUE. Double-click the text and it should change to FALSE.

I honestly don’t remember if this requires a restart of Firefox, so you’ll need to figure it out for yourself (I think it doesn’t, but could be wrong). It probably won’t hurt to restart anyway.

I love Firefox, I really do. But every so often the browser’s built-in media player will turn itself on, and any video or mp3 I click on will open a new tab with the file being played by the browser’s player instead of loading the download prompt, which is what I want.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to fix:

– In the address bar, type about:config and press ENTER. Accept the warning message (the exact text varies by Firefox version) and click “Continue”.

– Type (or paste) media.play-stand-alone in the search box at the top of the window.

– The value for the entry will almost certainly be set to TRUE. Double-click the text and it should change to FALSE.

This change should take effect immediately, without having to restart Firefox, although it certainly won’t hurt to restart anyway.