Keyboards are a type of archaic manual input device from the age before the iPhone, known for being popular with old people like me. If you’ve never encountered these antiques, you might be surprised to discover that they offer not only rapid text creation but also superior manual control of computer programs—like the Firefox browser, which just added custom keyboard shortcuts.
Alright, I’ll dispense with the irony. The newest nightly builds of Firefox for desktop platforms allow users to change existing keyboard shortcuts for actions like moving backwards and forwards in your history, opening a new tab or window, finding text on the page, printing, etc. You can find the new options for changing or clearing these shortcuts by typing about:keyboard in the URL bar in Firefox version 147.
As GHacks notes, custom keyboard shortcuts are available in some browsers that offer more advanced user control (like Opera or Vivaldi) but aren’t exactly a mainstream feature. It’s claimed that Firefox users have been asking for this feature for over 20 years now. I can’t independently verify that apart from a few ancient forum posts… though knowing how tweak-happy Firefox users got back in the glory days before Chrome, that seems entirely possible. Various extensions have offered some of this functionality, but having it baked into the core of the browser is a big deal for a very particular kind of web denizen.
Other recent additions to Firefox include more strenuous anti-fingerprinting measures for user privacy. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that Mozilla is offering a much different flavor of new feature to Firefox: an “AI Window” that mirrors similar AI efforts like Copilot in Edge and Gemini in Chrome. In the wise words of Liz Lemon, an icon from back when Firefox was young: “Blerg.”
Custom keyboard shortcuts are now live in Firefox Nightly builds as Mozilla tests them out. It’s not guaranteed that they’ll make it to the stable build (145, as of this writing), but it seems likely sooner or later.
