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How do you bring up the Context menu in FireFox? (I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro)

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I use a MacBook Pro with MacOS 10.11 and the latest version of FireFox (72.0.2) and I'm unable to figure out how to bring up the Context menu. With previous versions of FireFox. I could hold down the Control key and click a tab and that would bring up the Context menu. But with the latest versions of FireFox, that option is no longer available.

I suppose if I bought a two-button mouse, I could bring up the Context menu with the right button, but you should be able to bring up the Context menu with the trackpad that come with Apple's MacBook Pro.

So how do you bring up the Context menu on an Apple MacBook Pro?

Thank you so much.

I use a MacBook Pro with MacOS 10.11 and the latest version of FireFox (72.0.2) and I'm unable to figure out how to bring up the Context menu. With previous versions of FireFox. I could hold down the Control key and click a tab and that would bring up the Context menu. But with the latest versions of FireFox, that option is no longer available. I suppose if I bought a two-button mouse, I could bring up the Context menu with the right button, but you should be able to bring up the Context menu with the trackpad that come with Apple's MacBook Pro. So how do you bring up the Context menu on an Apple MacBook Pro? Thank you so much.

Chosen solution

Question: "How do you bring up the Context menu in FireFox? (I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro)"

Answer: Go to the Trackpad panel in the System Preferences and make sure that the "Secondary click" button is checked under the "Point and Click" heading. From then on, every time you click on a tab (or anything else) with two fingers (from one hand) instead of one, the Mac will bring up the Context menu.

In the old days, if you wanted to bring up the Context menu on a Mac with a trackpad, you held down the Control key with your left index finger and then clicked once on the trackpad with your right thumb.

Read this answer in context 👍 1

All Replies (13)

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Two-finger tap?

The trackpad doesn't have 2 buttons at the bottom? Some Macs did, at least.

You might also check in your system input settings for a hint.

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On Mac there should also be a long press setting for the left mouse button to open the context menu. You can check this pref on the about:config page.

  • ui.click_hold_context_menus
  • System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Mouse and Trackpad -> "Enable Mouse Keys"

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.

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I notice you created a second (locked) thread about closing multiple tabs where I wrote this reply:

Note that current Firefox releases allow to select multiple tabs or you can select all tabs. You can perform various actions including Close Tabs to the selected tabs, but this requires access to the right-click context menu of the Tab bar.

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Seçilmiş Həll

Question: "How do you bring up the Context menu in FireFox? (I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro)"

Answer: Go to the Trackpad panel in the System Preferences and make sure that the "Secondary click" button is checked under the "Point and Click" heading. From then on, every time you click on a tab (or anything else) with two fingers (from one hand) instead of one, the Mac will bring up the Context menu.

In the old days, if you wanted to bring up the Context menu on a Mac with a trackpad, you held down the Control key with your left index finger and then clicked once on the trackpad with your right thumb.

Modified by Marina43182

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Question: "How do you close multiple tabs in FireFox? (I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro)"

Answer: "With the Context menu now open (as above), choose 'Close Tabs to the Right' or 'Close Other Tabs' from the Context menu."

Modified by Marina43182

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There are some people with Mac familiarity, it just depends on the luck of the draw, and who is on at what time, etc. We are all merely volunteers "from the internet", although some Mozillians show up on occasion. Some are extremely knowledgeable, and then there's me. :D

You should definitely mark your own post which detailed your fix as The Solution, so other people can find it when having similar issues. It was good work!

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Marina43182 said

If I might make a suggestion to Mozilla's moderators, especially as a non-profit, Mozilla could really use some people with Apple familiarity here.

You and other Mac users can pitch in to answer questions that are Mac specific. It would save us Windows users a lot of Googling. ;-)

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What I meant is that you can select more than one tab at the same time to perform an action on all selected tabs, just like you can select a block of text or multiple bookmarks in a longer list. There is close tabs to the left and close tabs to the right in the tab context menu, but there is a way to select individual tabs or a range of tabs. To select multiple tabs, you first select the tab that you want to start with by clicking on it and then press the Shift key and click the last tab in the range. This will select all tab in this range and this is similar to selecting text of bookmarks in a list for copying or deleting. You can hold the Ctrl key (on Mac: Command) and click a Tab to toggle the selection state of this Tab to select or deselect a specific Tab. Selected tabs look for me a bit darker. If you right-click a selected tab then you will notice that various "Xxx Tab" items have there name changed to the plural "Xxx Tabs" to indicate that the action is applied to more than one tab. This would allow you for instance to select five tabs in a row via Shift and keep the tabs outside this range in case you want to cleanup some links you opened.

(edited to emphasize that on Mac you need to use the Command key for toggling individual tabs)

Modified by cor-el

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@crankygoat Thank you for your suggestions. Might I say you are a very inspirational person.

@jscher2000 Thank you jscher2000. What a nice complement.

@cor-el Thank you for all of your nice help cor-el.

Modified by Marina43182

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Hi Marina43182, multi-tab selection on Firefox's tab bar works like multi-file selection in Finder. If you want to select a number of tabs to take the same action on them, you can either:

  • Click the first tab, then Shift+click the last tab to select a contiguous range
  • Click the first tab, then Command+click each additional tab you want to add to the selection
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You mentioned marking my advice as "The Solution." How do I go about doing that?

I believe that i recall that option is a bit to the right of the beginning of any post, near the light grey "Report Abuse" link. (Some of us asked that these be moved or made more prominent in some way. Not everyone seems to find them... I hadn't, myself.)

Yes, it might be helpful if the Mozilla Foundation decided to spend money on a few expert support personnel. But also, I swear i have seen some Mac experts here, and i am not sure why they didn't find your question.

As far as threads closing, they get auto-archived after six months is all i know. I have no idea about mods closing unfinished threads.

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There is a "Solves the problem" button next to each reply that you can click to mark this reply as the solution and that makes an "Undo" button appear instead. If you change your mind then you can click Undo and possibly mark another reply.

I've colored this button green via userContent.css to make it easier to spot.

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@jscher2000 Thank you jscher2000. You should make that a separate thread for "How to select multiple tabs in Firefox using a Mac."

I tried it out on my MacBook Pro and both solutions work exquisitely.

@crankygoat Keep up the good work. Your contributions are just wonderful.

@cor-el Thank you cor-el for "How to post a solution." (You too crankygoat)

It was right on target cor-el and easy to follow.

I got to thinking that's such an important tool for the posters here, could you make it a separate thread?