Question

I’m currently working on a project where I have firefox launching in one of three modes:

1. normal
2. full – kiosk mode with only tabs, and home back and forward navigation showing.
3. Super – kiosk mode no tabs or anything showing just the content window (true kiosk mode)

Now due to time constraints I have implemented via pygtk rather than creating a custom Firefox extension as the requirements of the project would require a new flag adding to the command line in order to identify what mode it was to launch in. The approach I have used works beautifully, Great. . .

However the problem now is how can I disable all of the hot keys i.e. Ctrl + T, etc, without writing a extension. I am unable to use an existing extension because I need the shortcuts available when firefox is in normal mode and as firefox (for the project) can only be started via the command line programatically I would need a flag to determine weather to restrict the hot keys or not.

I was hoping to be able to achieve this using user.js which is placed programatically into the correct profiles when they are created in another bit of my application. I have tried using user.js by modifying accelKey, chromeAccess, contentAccess, generalAccessKey and menuAccessKey and setting their values to 0, which works for menu access but not for anything else.

Finally the Question

Is it possible to disable all shortcuts from user.js or can you only do it through an extension?

Answer 1

No, you cannot disable shortcut keys via preferences. Not all shortcut keys use the configurable Accel modifier, but even the ones that do cannot be disabled via preferences. In case you are interested, the code handling them only recognizes Meta, Alt and Ctrl as valid values, with Ctrl being the default for inputs that aren’t recognized. You can try using Meta (the corresponding code is 224), it seems unmapped on PC keyboard. For anything more fancy than that you will need an extension.