Firefox 97 has the latest evolution of the combined preview/setup/print experience introduced in Firefox 84. The old code has been removed. There's no going back.

There are bugs on file to add a new user preference and new keyboard shortcut to go directly to the system print dialog without a preview, if that's something you would prefer. Not sure whether that will arrive next month in Firefox 98 or whether it might take longer.

For now, how can we help streamline your workflow with the dialog we've got? What are you not finding in the setup panel that requires a trip to the system dialog?

@jscher2000, I have a very specific example of something not found in the setup panel that requires a trip to the system dialog?

There are specific settings that need to be added for receipt printers. These setting for cutting the receipt paper or opening the cash drawer are buried beyond the simplistic options the browser print dialogue provides.

Not having the option to default to the system printer dialogue increase the number of clicks necessary to provide a customer their receipt. Or could lead to a sales associate missing that the customer is due change.

I would counter your question with: What legitimate reason could their possibly be to limit users from defaulting to the built OS print system. Not trying to flame anything here, just looking to understand Mozilla's intent.

Happy to be schooled in a workable workaround should someone have one.

There are specific settings that need to be added for receipt printers. These setting for cutting the receipt paper or opening the cash drawer are buried beyond the simplistic options the browser print dialogue provides.

Those are interesting. Probably will always require the custom dialog if they cannot be set as defaults.

I would counter your question with: What legitimate reason could their possibly be to limit users from defaulting to the built OS print system.

There doesn't seem to have been much call for it during the past year, because people who preferred it were avoiding the current design and not making their voices heard. Well, hopefully it will be added in the next few weeks before the release of Firefox 98.

More generally, for business use, you might prefer to run the Extended Support Release of Firefox 91, which will have many more months of feature stability compared with the standard release. See: https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/enterprise/

Appreciate your quick reply. Also for understanding that I'm simply trying understand and deal with the fallout.

Good point about using the Enterprise version. We have used the Enterprise version before, but we ran into some issue, which unfortunately I can't recall at the moment.

There doesn't seem to have been much call for it during the past year, because people who preferred it were avoiding the current design and not making their voices heard.

I feel like this is one those moments were unintentional bias bleeds in. It's doubtful this little thread will garner enough attention. But I'm hopeful that an issue like this get picked up by some postmortem. That future readers or programmers stop to ask themselves questions like what are we not hearing or considering? Just because we can, should we?

This also seems to be a case study for understanding why people were avoiding the current design before pushing the solution even further. Maybe, rather than just cutting out functionality, that seems to have been struggle since somewhere in version 8x.0, actually fix the problem before releasing a version that removes base functionality?

I get that this is all easier to point out in hindsight. Knowing what you don't know, or asking the questions you don't know to ask isn't easy for anyone. But maybe it starts by finding people outside the main group perspective, and verifying the assumptions.

I'm not sure what you are suggesting about "what are we not hearing." It's hard to be in touch with 200 million users, so the UI/UX folks rely more on focus groups to develop and refine workflows, and then the bug tracking process for what was missed.

I don't know when it was determined that Firefox 96 was the last version which would have the old UI option. If that was in the release notes, would anyone notice or care? If it was a snippet on the bottom of the new tab page would anyone notice or care? I very much doubt it.

I think this kind of situation is inevitable unless people have a strong inclination to become involved in fixing big feature changes before they become irreversible.

To the degree that I can, I understand that it's hard to be in touch with 200M users. This is the first time I haven't been able to work around the problem. I'm not a developer and I have a day job to maintain. It is equally hard to know that I need to get involved to protect what seems like a fairly fundamental function. So now it's a problem and this is my first chance to try and get involved.

What I was trying to convey with "what are we not hearing." is that it seems like there are plenty of posts online describing how users used to be able to workaround the issue. The prevalence of such posts would seem like a good reason to make sure the focus groups included people who in fact need the feature. I get that it doesn't mean the feature will retained. But it doesn't sound like the voices that needed to be heard were "in the room" so to speak.

Anyway, it sounds like you maybe close to people who can make a difference? Now that there is at least one known use case, is it possible for you to take this issue to the people who can write this functionality back in? Or do I misunderstand your proximity?

Oh reading into your original post where would I find the "bugs on file to add a new user preference and new keyboard shortcut to go directly to the system print dialog without a preview, if that's something you would prefer."

Cause I would really like to be able to go directly to the system print dialog. Can I vote up that feature somewhere?

Bugzilla, the bug tracking system, does have a voting feature, but I'm not sure it makes much difference in which bugs get addressed first. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=voting.html

The reason I want to by pass the print preview is that: 1. I don't need to see my print and 2. It takes longer for the print preview to load. I am waiting an extra few seconds every time I print. And I print ALOT!

I would prefer to just go to the system dialogue box and print faster!

Might have to change browsers if there isn't a work around.