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"simplify page" option missing in print preview

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  • Last reply by Jonathan

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Today, when I go to print out a web page, the format of the Print Preview window has changed and the"Simplify Page" option is missing. I use this feature all the time. Without it many pages are impossible to print. How can I restore this feature?

Today, when I go to print out a web page, the format of the Print Preview window has changed and the"Simplify Page" option is missing. I use this feature all the time. Without it many pages are impossible to print. How can I restore this feature?

Chosen solution

Hi, Simplify Page applied Reader View to the page displayed in the Print Preview panel. With the new print experience, you can click the Reader View icon in the address bar to put the page in Reader View before calling up print and it should carry over automatically.

Does that work on yours?

Firefox 86 87 is likely to bring Simplify Page to the new print experience so if you forgot to switch the view before printing, you don't need to cancel printing, change view, and call up print again.


  • To tighten the line spacing or reduce text size in Reader View, see this reply.
  • To revert Firefox 85-86 back to the old design, see this reply.
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MGMofTulsa said

Earlier here, a post mentioned the add-on Print Edit We. Thanks. I've tried it, but with one problem. How do I get it to print the next or second page? Thanks.

After you finish editing, it should print the whole document. To resolve a missing content (incomplete printout) issue, on its toolbar, try Tools > Fix Page Breaks - Display:

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Tcan said

I have to agree with others that Reader View does not do the same thing that Simplify Page did. I can go to a Washington Post news page and want to save it as a clean pdf and Reader View does some simplify but much larger text, which can maybe be fixed with scaling, but why when the old way worked, and it doesn't strip out graphics down to a sort of Rich Text but just text style that was very useful. I'll use the trick of turning print.tab_modal off (thanks) but since this got buried in obscure settings I'm concerned the next thing is that kind of simplify will disappear altogether. I have no idea why this was changed when it was fine.

Same issues here stop messing with users . I will no longer support mozilla or recommend it to anyone. mozilla you think you know better stop messing with our freedoms and playing god . your becoming just like evil big tech now , i think you should read you user comments they and pissed at you. so am i. like Verizon has better support someones stated sarcasm , and they have maybe the worst support in the world. This workaround below only thing that worked not user friendly anymore .

You should get the Print Preview window if you open "File -> Print".

For now you can set print.tab_modal.enabled = false on the about:config page to revert to the old dialog.

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.

   https://support.mozilla.org/en-US//kb/about-config-editor-firefox
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jscher2000 said

yager said

Reader View is not at all helpful!!! The Print Preview feature was much easier to use and made it very easy to simply the page and customize it as needed. "Reader View" is horrible in this regard. Please bring back Print Preview.

Print Preview still exists. Are you not seeing a preview when you use menu > Print or Ctrl+P (on Mac, Command+P)?

If the new print experience is missing features you can't live without, you can roll it back for at least Firefox 84 and 85 as follows:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste tab_mo and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the print.tab_modal.enabled preference to switch the value from true (new experience) to false (classic)

This is great, the new experience looks like chrome, STOP MAKING FIREFOX like that please, you're better don't make yourself like chrome, chrome sucks

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