While trying out the updated Firefox browser – Firefox Quantum – one of the handiest features I’ve found is the built-in screenshots functionality.

I’d read briefly about it at https://screenshots.firefox.com and was expecting it to be available via a button or a menu option, but its actually available through a 3 dot selector/button in the url field – with Take a Screenshot being one of the available options.

Once you’ve found this option, you can then easily take a screenshot of:

  • a selected area (you can use the mouse to set the selected area as big or small as you require)
  • the visible area (just what’s visible on the browser page)
  • the whole page (the whole page from top to bottom)

Then when you’ve got the required screenshot, you have a couple of options to save/download it:

  • you can download it to your Downloads folder by pressing the Download icon and it will be saved with a filename something like “Screenshot-2018-1-17 Testing Resources.png” where Testing Resources is the page title of the page where I took the screenshot
  • or save it to the cloud with screenshots.firefox.com available for 14 days, with example URL https://screenshots.firefox.com/8pngaQnrBtXWMncI/www.patwalsh.co.uk

This screenshots tool has the following advantages:

  • you don’t have to use another application to take a screenshot
  • you can easily take a screenshot of a small part of the page, the visible page or even the whole page – which is sometimes useful when you want to show several display issues on a page like a landing page or a homepage
  • when saving to your Downloads folder, it automatically adds in the page title to the filename, making it easier to find the relevant screenshot