how to customize web browser context menu keyboard shortcuts

February 26, 2009 11:01 AM

How to change the keyboard shortcuts in the IE or Firefox context menus?

Like many people, I use Firefox at home but am forced to use Internet Explorer at work. For the most part the two amicably co-exist in my universe. The one consistent annoyance, however, is this:

When you right click on a link in IE, the keyboard shortcut to open the link in a new tab is "w".

When you right click on a link in Firefox, the shortcut is "t".

I'm the sort who likes to open links in new tabs all in one go so that they load in the background, and then read them leisurely. How can I change the shortcut in either IE or Firefox so that they're the same in both?

My google-fu is failing me -- all the links I come across are for adding NEW context menu items, not for changing the keyboard shortcut on existing ones.

posted by randomstriker to computers & internet (5 comments total)

These are hardcoded. You can probably patch Firefox source to change it.

Frankly though, I just use Ctrl-click.
posted by rhizome at 11:03 AM on February 26

You cannot change this in IE, it's hard coded.

Well, I suppose you could load up IEFrame.dll into the resource editor and attempt to change the menu resource. The & specifies the shortcut key, so in: &File, the F would be the shortcut key.

If you do this, the next time you install a patch for IE it will get over-written.
posted by jeffamaphone at 11:10 AM on February 26

Just use ctrl-click like rhizome says. I didn't even know the "t" and "w" shortcuts since I always use ctrl-click.
posted by zephyr_words at 11:21 AM on February 26

Wow. Talk about looking for a hard solution to an easy problem. Thanks, guys, CTRL-click it is.
posted by randomstriker at 12:00 PM on February 26

For Firefox, you can edit the following file under your Firefox program folder:

chrome\en-US.jar\locale\browser\browser.dtd

In Windows, this is typically located in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox. If you don't use the U.S. English version of Firefox, use the appropriate .jar file named after your language code.

The underlined part in that path -- en-US.jar -- is an archive file with other things inside of it; You will have to extract the browser.dtd file, edit it, and then repack it.

The lines that define the shortcuts will look like this:

<!ENTITY openLinkCmdInTab.accesskey "T">

openLinkCmdInTab, in this case is the name of the context menu command, and "T" is the shorcut key.

To find out the name of the command you're looking for, search for the command's text until you find a line like this:

<!ENTITY openLinkCmdInTab.label "Open Link in New Tab">
posted by qvtqht at 6:39 PM on February 26