Firefox for Android context menu editing

kWazt@lemmy.world to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 87 points –

Recently Amazon, I suppose their app, added a search item to my context menu, which is quite a nuisance. Other apps have as well, such as DeepL and Wikipedia, but I believe those have a valid use case without too much of a commercial interest. Is there a way to remove items from the context menu without removing the related app?

15

It's the Amazon app. I noticed the same after I installed the app too.

Note it is an android system wide context menu, not a Firefox menu. If you long press in text in other apps you'll get the same menu.

I can't see any options to turn this off in android. Apparently the app doesn't even need permission to interfere with the system wide context menu in that way.

Thanks for explaining!
Now I know it's almost like they're asking for me to uninstall their app!

Their app is an unresponsive heap of burning garbage anyway.

Easy solution, uninstall the app. The mobile website works just as well.

weirdly enough the mobile site actually works better. You cannot purchase movies or TV shows in the prime video app OR the Amazon shopping app. You can only do it on the mobile website.

I switched to just using the mobile website a while back and it's been a perfectly smooth transition. Never noticed a difference except a lack of some creepy vibes from the app lol

Is there any benefit for using the app over the site? I stopped using Amazon, but when I did use, the site seemed to work just fine.

Amazon Smile trades ad views for 1% of their proceeds to a non-profit of your choice (including the FSF, EFF, and more, though I think RMS would have a seizure accepting this money)

Whole Foods gives you significant discounts on hot foods if you scan a QR code from the app (still expensive though).

I don't use these personally but I can totally see someone using them.

If I’m not mistaken, the Smile donations feature has ended.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/19/1149993013/amazon-amazonsmile-charity-donation-program

Yes. my non-profit used to receive Smile donations. I can personally attest that we got emails about the program ending and that it did end.

Right after they killed Book Depository? Wow they are getting rid of everything worth keeping...

I'm not sure if I understand. Isn't this a normal thing, Amazon just made it look like you're normal one, plus "Amazon"? I could be misunderstanding.

edit judging by the down votes I guess I misunderstood?

You've been able to capture and replace context menus in browsers for years. I don't use them in my development because they're annoying but this is one that I played with one time:

https://carbon-components-svelte.onrender.com/components/ContextMenu

(The feature has been Dollar Store DRM for years - that's how you just disable the context menu altogether. "We have DRM at home"- type DRM.)

To be clear, the reason this isn't common is because of OP's response -- it feels intrusive and the more "value" it adds (ie how customized it is) is proportional to how intrusive it feels.

To make matters worse, as far as I know, you can't replace the context menu just sometimes, like, it would be cool to just customize options on images for example, or links -- but it's whole page or nothing -- so using the feature at all means using it everywhere, and, for me anyway, it's kind of a lot of effort, which sits on the scale with "intrusive and annoying" to outweigh the value add.