SOLVED: How to Disable Ctrl-Q in Firefox

Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 12:05 am | 30,163 views | trackback url

As a hardcore Firefox user with no less than 30-50 tabs loaded in the browser at any given time, it always annoyed me that they put the shortcut for closing a tab (Ctrl-W), right next to the shortcut for closing the entire browser itself (Ctrl-Q). I have 38 extensions loaded into Firefox right now as I type this blog post, and next to my keyboard itself, Firefox gets the most use.

When I’m working in the dark, or not looking at the keyboard and I fat-finger the ^W key-combo, I frequently hit ^Q by mistake, closing the browser and all of the tabs with it. ARG! Not fun.

I finally got tired of having to restart the browser all the time when I close it by accident, and decided to look for a fix. Luckily I found it in an extension called “keyconfig” that does exactly what I need!

“keyconfig adds the ability to create new or modify existing shortcuts defined by a element, but only changing those which itself call a function (those with a command or oncommand attribute) has an effect (all others fulfill only cosmetic purposes it seems and are grayed out).”

Once I installed keyconfig and restarted Shiretoko, I was able to go into the prefs for it as shown here:

Firefox keyconfig prefs menu

Scroll down to find the “Quit” menu accelerator in the list. Highlight it and click “Disable”

Firefox keyconfig prefs menu

Closed out of the prefs, and went to File, and voila! No more Ctrl-Q next to the Quit option!

Firefox keyconfig prefs menu

For those who might be wondering about my 38 Add-ons in Firefox, they currently are:

  1. AdBlock Plus version 1.1.1
  2. Better GCal version 0.3
  3. Better Gmail 2 version 0.9.5
  4. BetterPrivacy version 1.45
  5. CacheViewer version 0.6
  6. ChatZilla version 0.9.85
  7. ColorfulTabs version 3.9.7
  8. Console2 0.5
  9. CustomizeGoogle version 0.76
  10. DOM Inspector version 2.0.3
  11. DownThemAll! 1.1.7
  12. DownloadHelper version 4.6.4
  13. Evernote Web Clipper version 3.0.0.57015
  14. FireGPG version 0.7.10
  15. Firebug version 1.4.5
  16. Firefox Showcase version 0.9.5.1
  17. Flashblock version 1.5.12a2
  18. FoxyProxy version 2.14
  19. Google PageRank Status version 1.0
  20. Googlepedia version 0.6.1
  21. Greasemonkey version 0.8.20090920.2
  22. Hyperwords version 5.6.1
  23. Linkification version 1.3.6
  24. Linky version 2.7.1
  25. Live HTTP Headers version 0.15
  26. NoScript version 1.9.9.14
  27. PageSpeed version 1.3.0.1
  28. Power Twitter version 1.37
  29. PrefBar version 4.2.0
  30. Read it Later version 0.9948
  31. Remember The Milk for Gmail version 1.0.4
  32. Resurrect Pages version 2.0.4
  33. Tab Mix Plus version 0.3.8.2pre.091012
  34. Tab Sidebar version 2.5
  35. TimeStamp Converter version 1.4.3
  36. Total Validator version 6.1
  37. VMware Remote Console Plug-in version 2.5.0.122581
  38. Web Developer version 1.1.8
  39. keyconfig version 20080929

Last Modified: Sunday, March 6th, 2016 @ 02:12

One Response to “SOLVED: How to Disable Ctrl-Q in Firefox”

  1. Keyconfig looks pretty nice, but if all you want is to disable CTRL-Q (or, at least, get a warning popup that lets you cancel the quit) you don’t need a plugin.

    Type “about:config” as the URL. You may get a “You break it, it’s not our fault” sort of warning; click on through that.

    Search for “quit”.

    Double-click on the browser.showQuitWarning line to set it to true.

    And that’s it!


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