How to print using the system dialog box?
I am running Firefox 99.0 on an iMac with MacOS Catalina 10.15.7. With a recent update to Firefox I can no longer print using the system dialog box as default. I did already try switching the "print.tab_modal.enabled preference" to "false" and that simply doesn't work. When that flag is set to "false" and I print from within Firefox, the Firefox print dialog comes up, not the system print dialog. Why can't I change it so that the system print dialog comes up by default?????
All Replies (8)
Lots of other threads on this search, "PRINT USING SYSTEM DIALOG"
Firefox 97-100 did not have a setting to skip the built-in preview/setup overlay and automatically show the system print dialog. Firefox 101 now has one. Here's how you can try it out:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future.
(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste print.prefer_system_dialog and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the preference to switch the value from false to true
If you need to restore the default display, you can call up the preference and double-click again to toggle the value back to false. There's also will be a reset arrow at the right end of the row when the preference has a non-default value.
Thank you! I had been reading other questions regarding this and the other answers pointed toward print.tab_modal.enabled, which appears to have been deprecated. We need to get this post higher in the search results.
Hi Druce, that option just became available yesterday, so it's going to take time to get updated in the numerous other threads.
WARNING: Changing preferences through this interface not officially supported Hidden settings edited using the about:config tool are explicitly not supported, which means that Mozilla makes no guarantees they will be supported in the future, or that Mozilla will fix them if they break. Mozilla does not test these preferences, and will not in the future. That includes security and performance testing which these preferences may affect.
99.9999% of my printing on the mac is to print preview where I can drag and drop douments into other applications. -- I was just now ready to throw in the towel and dump Fire Fox, when I thought I would check one more time for a resolution.
1/2 worked. As before the change the print system dialog box did the same -- The print preview sometimes make the document extra large and the page cut off -- making the document unusable. This was a pdf opened from Gmail and the preview to drag and drop to google drive. In addition it puts all these characters and names that are not a part of the file name - not just in this case, but every time I open a document.
Dean said
1/2 worked. As before the change the print system dialog box did the same -- The print preview sometimes make the document extra large and the page cut off -- making the document unusable. This was a pdf opened from Gmail and the preview to drag and drop to google drive. In addition it puts all these characters and names that are not a part of the file name - not just in this case, but every time I open a document.
Hi Dean, I think the image enlargement is a new issue: Firefox 103-104 for Mac have a bug with PDFs that contain embedded images or which consist of one huge image. The image is not scaled correctly, so this happens:
- Embedded images: the image is enlarged within its original boundaries and much of it gets lost
- Entire PDF is an image: the image flows off the page regardless of what kind of scaling you try
There is a bug on file for this, and hopefully there will be a fix in Firefox 105.
For now, I'm not aware of any workaround to make it work in Firefox. You can open the PDFs in Preview or Acrobat for printing. Here's how to do it on a one-by-one basis:
- For PDFs that show an https:// address, use the download button on the viewer toolbar to save it.
- For PDFs that show a file:/// address, click the Downloads button on the toolbar, right-click (Ctrl+click) the item, and open in Preview/Acrobat/System Viewer (the display may vary).
If this is a frequent problem, you can change the way Firefox handles PDFs by default to either ask how you want to open the PDF or just automatically open it in Preview or Acrobat. This support article has the details: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-or-choose-another-viewer
As for the file name, I'm not sure what is going on there. You are trying to drag something from Firefox's print preview itself? Or the Mac system printing dialog's preview?