How to Display On-Screen Keyboard in Mozilla Firefox

In the new version of the popular web browser Mozilla Firefox, they have made it much easier to use on the touch-screen enabled devices by adding an on-screen keyboard that shows up automatically when you use Firefox on tablet computers or touch-screen enabled desktop or notebook computers. This feature is available since the version 43.0 of the Firefox browser. But this on-screen keyboard does not show up if you have attached a physical keyboard to your computer. Fortunately, as always, Firefox makes it very easy to configure the browser and make the on-screen keyboard available even when you have a physical keyboard attached.

Here is how you can configure Firefox to display the on-screen keyboard even in the presence of a real physical keyboard:

  1. Open Firefox web browser, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
  2. A warning will be displayed, you have to click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button to proceed.
  3. Type keyboard in the search text-box to narrow down the preferences and find a a preference named ui.osk.detect_physical_keyboard.Firefox On-Screen Keyboard
  4. Double-click on this ui.osk.detect_physical_keyboard preference to change its value from true to false.
  5. Restart Firefox and now you would be able to use the on-screen touch keyboard in Firefox.Firefox On-Screen Keyboard

The on-screen keyboard is displayed only in the tablet version of the Windows operating system. If you are using Windows 10 in the desktop mode, then you can switch Windows 10 into table mode to check out this new feature in Firefox.

2 comments

  1. I have virtual on-screen keyboard which I use when I need to type Russian/English text. It comes up and stays by touching screen under Chrome browser and not under Firefox. My regular keyboard is connected as well. Is it possible to make virtual keyboard work under Firefox. I have Dell All In One PC.

    Thanks.

    1. It is a long time known problem with Firefox. You can try disabling hardware acceleration and multi-process support in Firefox settings.

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