Can't Print from Firefox? Two Fixes That Actually Work

Tech & Gaming
1

Had a fun afternoon where Firefox just refused to print anything. Not a printer issue – Chrome printed fine, the printer was responding, everything was connected. It was specifically Firefox that was broken. Either the print dialog wouldn’t open at all or it would open and just hang there doing nothing when I hit Print.

After going down a troubleshooting rabbit hole, here’s what actually fixed it and why.

Fix 1: Clear Firefox’s saved print settings

This is the one most people don’t know about. Firefox saves print settings – things like orientation, margins, paper size, scale – in its profile data. If these saved settings get corrupted or conflict with the current printer, the print dialog can fail silently or hang.

The way to clear this isn’t in the UI settings. You have to use the about:support page:

  1. Type about:support in the address bar
  2. Click “Clear saved print settings” (it’s in the page under the Print section)
  3. Close and reopen Firefox
  4. Try printing again

This fixed the problem for me immediately. The saved print settings were apparently corrupted from an old printer configuration I hadn’t used in months.

Fix 2: Adjust print settings manually through Ctrl+P

If clearing the settings doesn’t solve it completely, the second step is to go through the print dialog manually and verify each setting:

Open Ctrl+P and check:

  • Orientation: Make sure it’s set to what you expect (portrait vs landscape)
  • Color mode: “Color” vs “Black and White” – some printers reject jobs if this doesn’t match their default
  • Scale: Should be at 100% or “Fit to page” for most documents. If this is set to something unusual, some printer drivers reject it
  • Margins: Custom margin settings can sometimes cause printer driver conflicts

The “Fit to page” option under Scale is worth selecting if you’re not sure. It lets Firefox handle the scaling rather than passing it to the printer driver, which removes one potential failure point.

Why Firefox specifically?

Firefox manages its own print pipeline rather than fully delegating to the OS print system. That gives it more control over print output but means it can develop its own config issues that are independent of the rest of the system. Chrome and Edge lean more heavily on the OS print system, which is why they often “just work” when Firefox doesn’t.

The about:support page in general is underused. It’s where Firefox exposes a lot of diagnostic and reset options that aren’t in the normal settings UI. Worth bookmarking if you use Firefox regularly and run into other issues.

This video shows exactly where to find the saved print settings option and walks through the Ctrl+P adjustments:

2

The about:support page is genuinely a hidden gem. I’ve used it for other things – resetting accessibility settings, clearing session data for specific sites – and never thought to look there for print stuff. Makes sense that print config would be buried there too. Firefox’s approach to settings has always been “power users will find it eventually.”

Good write-up.

3

Had a version of this at work where the print dialog opened but was missing the printer I needed. Turned out to be a Firefox-specific permissions issue with the printer driver. Clearing the profile’s saved settings also fixed that one. Seems like Firefox print config corruption is more common than people realize.

4

I print a lot of student work from web pages and have run into this before. The Fit to Page option is genuinely underrated for avoiding cut-off edges on web content. Most pages aren’t designed for print and Fit to Page handles the overflow gracefully. Should probably be the default.

5

Worth adding: if neither of these works, try printing to PDF first (print > Save to PDF). If that works but physical print doesn’t, the problem is definitely in the Firefox-to-printer driver handoff rather than in Firefox’s print rendering. That narrows down where to look next.

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I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for years and genuinely didn’t know about about:support. Just opened it now. There’s a lot of useful stuff in there. The “Clear saved print settings” button is just sitting there quietly. Thanks for this, bookmarked.