Updates Breaking Things

I updated MacOS recently. After restarting, Firefox suddenly had some shortcuts. Probably an automatic Firefox update also took effect after restarting. The new shortcuts bound Globe+Control+↑/↓ to moving and resizing the Firefox window to the upper half or lower half of the screen. I already do this with Rectangle using Control-Option-↑/↓, so I didn't need them. Problem is, that on the Macbook Pro, Globe+↑/↓ works as PageUp and PageDown, and Control+PageUp/PageDown is the shortcut to move left and right between tabs. This still works, but now I also end up halving and moving the window up and down, which is not ideal on an ultrawide monitor.

Whatever, these things happen and it's not like I'm paying anything to use Firefox, at least not directly. The first problem was actually to find the source of these shortcuts. I assumed that the MacOS update had introduced them, so it took me a little while to realize that the hotkey was within Firefox^{1, 2}. Having found the cause of the problem, I thought it would be straightforward to fix it. Just change or disable the hotkeys in Firefox. Unfortantely, this was easier said than done after digging a bit around in the settings.

But every cloud has a silver lining. This could be another trial for some AI tools. Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity were all really good at inventing plausible-sounding menus and options in about:config as well as creating elaborate step-by-step instructions. Traditional search didn't do much better. Google didn't find anything helpful, while Kagi's top hits were more relevant, but out of date. As happens more and more often lately, I ended up searching through Reddit. LLMs are still great for Python coding, making visualizations and the occasional DataFrame transformation, but I'm wondering if these kind of niche, configuration problems will get worse or better as AI-driven development catches on³.

The fact that I'm using Rectangle probably means that I'm not an average user, but are any Firefox users? There are few things more annoying than having to waste time trying to fix something that broke due to an update. No wonder no IT security is a mess when people are scared of updating stuff. I really don't understand why anyone would think window management hotkeys should be inside Firefox?⁴ Especially since they can't be disabled or changed. Imagine if more applications did the same.

Sorry for the rant, but after wasting what felt like several hours it had to come out. Now I can either wait for customizable hotkeys, change browser, remap my fingers to something else when I want to change tabs or hope that someone reads this an sends me an email. Or maybe it as a blessing in disguise that it gets a bit harder to change tabs? It might make me actually read or close tabs instead of surfing mindlessly between tabs.