Why does Firefox need it’s own print dialog?

Recently Firefox started loading it’s own dialog when trying to print a web page, about version 85.  I have never had any real problems with the Ubuntu’s print dialog, so I was surprised when the Firefox version showed up.  I really like the Simplify Page feature which cleaned up a lot of poorly formatted web pages in print.  Were they trying to compete with Chrome’s print functionality?  I hate the way Chrome defaults to printing in the cloud!  Am I being paranoid or is this a new way for Google to get more of my data.

Back to the real issue, how to get the system dialog back in Firefox.  Unfortunately the designers left that out of the Preferences dialogs.  Luckily there is another way.

  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 between true (new experience) and false (classic)
  4. If there is another preference named app.normandy.startupRolloutPrefs.print.tab_modal.enabled and it’s set to true, you can double-click that one to switch it to false as well. If you do not have that one, no need to create it.