Firefox lastly will get customized keyboard shortcuts, delighting long-time followers

Keyboards are a kind of archaic handbook enter system from the age earlier than the iPhone, recognized for being widespread with previous individuals like me. Should you’ve by no means encountered these antiques, you may be stunned to find that they provide not solely speedy textual content creation but additionally superior handbook management of laptop packages—just like the Firefox browser, which simply added customized keyboard shortcuts.

Alright, I’ll dispense with the irony. The most recent nightly builds of Firefox for desktop platforms enable customers to vary current keyboard shortcuts for actions like shifting backwards and forwards in your historical past, opening a brand new tab or window, discovering textual content on the web page, printing, and so forth. Yow will discover the brand new choices for altering or clearing these shortcuts by typing about:keyboard within the URL bar in Firefox model 147.

As GHacks notes, customized keyboard shortcuts can be found in some browsers that provide extra superior consumer management (like Opera or Vivaldi) however aren’t precisely a mainstream function. It’s claimed that Firefox customers have been asking for this function for over 20 years now. I can’t independently confirm that other than just a few historical discussion board posts… although realizing how tweak-happy Firefox customers received again within the glory days earlier than Chrome, that appears completely potential. Numerous extensions have supplied a few of this performance, however having it baked into the core of the browser is an enormous deal for a really explicit form of internet denizen.

Different current additions to Firefox embrace extra strenuous anti-fingerprinting measures for consumer privateness. I’d be remiss if I didn’t additionally level out that Mozilla is providing a a lot completely different taste of latest function to Firefox: an “AI Window” that mirrors comparable AI efforts like Copilot in Edge and Gemini in Chrome. Within the smart phrases of Liz Lemon, an icon from again when Firefox was younger: “Blerg.”

Customized keyboard shortcuts are actually dwell in Firefox Nightly builds as Mozilla exams them out. It’s not assured that they’ll make it to the steady construct (145, as of this writing), however it appears doubtless eventually.