1905852 - For privacy and activism, we need a way to hide the toolbar or extensions before snapshotting the screen

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Screenshots, enhancement)

Description

[ed]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I looked everywhere for a way to hide the toolbar. I also looked for a way to hide individual extensions without disabling them.

Found nothing. Unlike Chromium, where there is a puzzle piece icon that expands a list of extensions with thumbtacks, which enable the user to control whether an extension is hidden or exposed.

Actual results:

I was forced to take a snapshot of a screen that exposes the full catalog of extensions that are installed. Then I had to use GIMP to either blackout or crop the snapshot for privacy.

Expected results:

Users need control over the appearance of their toolbar for two reasons:

• privacy— When taking a snapshot of the screen to share with others, it’s important for users to hide details about their customisations. Bookmarks are easy (control-B), and hiding tabs is impossible although there is a workaround (tear off the tab). But hiding the toolbar of extensions is apparently impossible.

• practicality— Extension icons can create clutter and shrink the address field, and cause inconveniences. It would be useful to control which tools are exposed to improve workflow. When a screenshot is being used for the purpose of obtaining tech support, being able to hide the irrelevent extensions and expose the relevant ones can improve the communication.

I propose a few new features:

*① In the puzzle piece dialog, add a switch for every extension to control visibility of the extension on the toolbar which is independent of whether the extension is actively running.
*② In the puzzle piece dialog, add a master switch that removes all extensions from view. Note that the state of the independent switches should not be forgotten. When a user turns back /on/ the master switch, then the individual switches should return to their original states (because some may have been off to declutter the screen).
*③ Users who alter permissions.default.image would typically want to restore it to “1”, to load images before taking a snapshot; or the contrary, may want to hide images from the snapshot. The most tedious step I have to do before taking a snapshot is change that setting because there is no quickly reachable toggle. Note that it has been requested to at least give extensions access to that setting: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364929. But ideally it should be built-in to support ⑤ below.
*④ Add a feature to hide the tabs and hide the scrollbars. There are extensions for this but it needs to be built-in to support support ⑤ below:
*⑤ Add a “depersonalisation / prepare window for snapshotting” toggle so users don’t have to install ~3+ different extensions and make ~5+ different adjustments before every screenshot. There should be one action that hides the bookmarks, the extensions, the tabs, and the scrollbar.
*⑥ Add the snapshot capability too. Users should not have to rely on some 3rd party tool to do this. In principle, it would be useful to have a CLI option to do this non-graphically. E.g. “firefox --render-to-file-and-exit=snapshot.png $target_url”. This would also be particularly useful for users of text-based email clients like mutt who want a non-interactive graphical snapshot of what an HTML email is intended to look like in order to share the email with others outside of email.

Workaround: It is possible to create a Firefox profile just for snapshotting. But this has many drawbacks. A user may already have many profiles for different networks (VPN, Tor, clearnet) and for various other configs (JS disabled, images disabled, etc). So it’s obviously quite a mess to create a snapshot profile for every browsing profile as someone with 6 profiles would then need 12 profiles. And in the end there is no workaround for the case where an extension is needed to produce an effect to snapshot but its presence is unwanted in the view.

Comment 1

[Monica Chiorean]

Mark as New since this is an enhancement. Please update if not correct. Thank you.

Comment 2

[Niklas Baumgardner [:niklas]]

(In reply to ed from comment #0)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I looked everywhere for a way to hide the toolbar. I also looked for a way to hide individual extensions without disabling them.

Found nothing. Unlike Chromium, where there is a puzzle piece icon that expands a list of extensions with thumbtacks, which enable the user to control whether an extension is hidden or exposed.

You can right click on the toolbar and select the "Customize toolbar" item to move/hide the toolbar buttons into the overflow menu or in the extension puzzle icon or remove toolbar buttons from the toolbar.

We also have a build in screenshots tool that will only screenshot the content area.
You can open screenshots by doing ctrl/cmd + shift + S, or by right clicking the page and selecting the "Take screenshot" item.

We also have a feature to capture a screenshot from the command line.
For example, firefox -screenshot https://www.mozilla.org/ will capture a screenshot on mozilla.com.

We also have more feature request and discussion on https://connect.mozilla.org/.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

I think given everything outlined in comment #2, and given that built-in screenshots tool screenshots the page minus all of the toolbar, we're unlikely to add different functionality to make it easier to use OS screenshotting that then hides the browser UI somehow - it would almost certainly be more cumbersome to use than the builtin tools. Most OS screenshot functionality allows selecting arbitrary rects anyway, too... so the usecase is just too narrow to justify a dedicated browser feature.