Mozilla is saying goodbye to Firefox’s current Print Preview dialog, the company has prepared a new User interface for Print Preview in version 81 (that looks similar to Chrome Print UI) and is enabled by default in Nightly.
In Firefox, when you click on the menu and select print option, Print Preview opens from the current browser window instead of using a new window.
From the bug reported 19 years back, Firefox should close the browser window if you close the Print Preview window, which is not because it was intentional by design to prevent data loss.
To make Print Preview UI consistent with the other applications on Windows and to address UI flaws, Mozilla is readying a tab modal print UI for Firefox and is available in Firefox 81 Nightly and is turned on also on Experiments page as “Print Preview Redesign”.
Like Chrome’s Print Preview dialog, Firefox new Print UI offers the following options on the right sidebar while displaying page preview on the left side:
- Printers to choose under Destination
- Option to select the number of Copies
- Orientation to choose from Portrait or Landscape
- Under More Settings, Scale -> Fit to page, Scale, Options: Print headers and footers, Print backgrounds
For more options, you need to select ” Print using the System dialog”.
Enable or disable new Print Preview UI in Firefox
- Visit about: config
- Search for “print.tab_modal.enabled”
- Click on toggle icon to change its value to True.
Note: Changing the preference value to ‘false’ disables the new UI.
The WIP feature currently doesn’t’ contain window controls such as minimize, Restore, and close and Simplify page option. As of now, to close the Print Preview dialog, you need to click the “Cancel” button.
The new Print Preview UI is tied to tab instead of the Firefox browser window, closing the tab from which you’re printing, closes the Print Preview.
Related articles:
Firefox 50: Simplify Page feature turned on by default for Print Preview
Chrome Print Preview dialog gets Print Selection Option