Firefox right click menu not working properly with Workspace

As more people continue to move away from IE and adopt Firefox as the default Oracle EPM browser, some run into an annoying little issue.

 When performing a right click in Workspace, using Firefox browser, the Firefox shortcut menu overlays the Oracle Workspace menu making it difficult to access the Oracle menu items.


A quick way to get to the Oracle menu is to press the escape key, but having to do that all the time can be annoying.

There is a setting in Firefox that drives this behavior.  The solution to this is to change the Context Menu option in Firefox to True. 

Basic solution


1) Open Firefox and type 'about:config' in the search bar


2) Search for 'dom.event.contextmenu.enabled and change value to 'true'



You can now go into Workspace and the right click menu will work as expected.

Advanced solution

We actually had an interesting time with this for a while.  Once we figured out how to correct the issue we were getting complaints from users that it worked for a while but then would revert back to the old behavior.  This took some more digging and I finally figured out the issue.

Some enterprise deployments of Firefox will actually distribute a 'Firefox preferences configuration file'.  This file has various settings that the administrator wants for the browser by default.  When a user logs in, the file is read and Firefox settings are updated.  So in our case we were changing the option to true but the config file had it set to false, so the next time the users went back into Firefox the options were reseting.

The steps for updating the config file are as follows:

32 bit Windows
  1. Make sure Firefox is closed
  2. Go to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
  3. Scroll to find mozilla.cfg
  4. Make a copy of the file called mozilla.cfg_old (this is just so you have a backup of original)
  5. Open mozilla.cfg in text editor
  6. Scroll to pref("dom.event.contextmenu.enabled”,false);
  7. Change it to pref("dom.event.contextmenu.enabled",true);
  8. Save and close file
  9. Restart Firefox

64 bit Windows
  1. Make sure Firefox is closed
  2. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
  3. Scroll to find mozilla.cfg
  4. Make a copy of the file called mozilla.cfg_old (this is just so you have a backup of original)
  5. Open mozilla.cfg in text editor
  6. Scroll to pref("dom.event.contextmenu.enabled”,false);
  7. Change it to pref("dom.event.contextmenu.enabled",true);
  8. Save and close file
  9. Restart Firefox

Now depending on how your administrator distributes this file you could still wind up with an issue if they overwrite your updated file, but at least now you know where to check.  You could discuss with the administrator and find out why they want it to false and have them change it.  In our case there was a concern this was a security risk, but the admin team agreed it wasn't and changed it back to true.  In the worst case scenario if the admin insists it needs to be false, depending on your willingness to break the rules, you could always create a batch script that runs on login and edits the file.  Of course depending on how strict your company is this could result in you getting fired so take that advice with a grain of salt and exercise your own discretion.  If you are stuck with the option set to false, refer to the beginning of this post where I suggested using the 'Escape' key!

Comments

Post a Comment