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Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

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Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#21

Post by Erunno »

masklinn wrote: post #15
comex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and there is no excuse for jerky scrolling and a broken full screen mode.

> a broken full screen mode. The only broken full screen mode is Lion's. If anything, I am saddened Firefox is switching to that POS.

Agreed. I wish Mozilla would have left an option to retain the current behavior, even if buried in about:config. Lions native fullscreen mode is so much fail it's almost unbelievable that it ever past any internal testing let alone be released to actual customers.

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#22

Post by thought_alarm »

I've followed Mozilla.org since the project was first announced in 1998, and I've been a Mac OS X user since 2004.

Unfortunately, they've routinely shipped OS X versions of Firefox with show stoppingly-bad performance and UI bugs, and they've been far too conservative in addressing such issues. For years I rolled my own builds of Firefox just to include patches for important bugs that had been left languishing in bugzilla. (I see they finally fixed horizontal scrolling, only 7 years after two-finger scrolling was first introduced. Nice.)

As soon as Safari was able to match Firefox's performance, which was about 5 years ago, I left Firefox behind for good. Firefox was always, and probably still is, a fine browser on Windows, but the OS X version of Firefox is second class and really only suitable for Firefox superfans.

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#23

Post by jentulman »

That the UI additions are missing is a deal breaker for the author is fair enough, we each like to use our machines our own way, but Lion is less than a year old, and Firefox is not a small product, so it seems a bit harsh to call out missing UI candy that is completely unrelated to the softwares core purpose, displaying web pages well, after pointing out the amount of effort that has just been put in to improving that core functionality.

Personally I went back to Snow Leopard as I think these very Lion features was a step backward in usability for my tastes. I don't like the disappearing scroll bars, and mission control is a poor replacement for spaces/expose.

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#24

Post by duhh1234 »

It's an opensource project run by a nonprofit.... nothing is stopping you from contributing ... did you even file a bug report or look one up regarding this issue?

not even apple has updated all of it's software to support these new features.. hell they can't even get xcode to stop crashing constantly yet...

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#25

Post by frou_dh »

oinksoft wrote: post #5

I'd just like to say that I'm very thankful Firefox has neither invisible scrollbars nor inertial scrolling. F11 is full-screen in Firefox.

Inertial scrolling felt bad to me at first, but I've come to enjoy it after giving it a fair shot. This is often the case with UI / design changes.

(I also remember being convinced that Win9x-style aliased font rendering was the pinnacle and shunned ClearType and co. for a few years)

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#26

Post by quink »

kijin wrote: post #12

Firefox is not a good citizen on any OS other than Windows. In Linux, the Firefox button becomes an awkward-looking upside-down tab in the tab bar, because you're apparently not supposed to intrude into the sacrosanct title bar. (What about Chrome?) It also takes quite a bit of tweaking on the distributor's part to make Firefox look and behave like the rest of the OS (e.g. icon theme and font anti-aliasing), though t…

> Firefox is not a good citizen on any OS other than Windows.

It's not a good citizen on Windows either.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574973

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#27

Post by jlawer »

Firefox was never the best Cocoa (i.e. OSX) implementation of Gecko, Firefox aims to be the best CROSS PLATFORM implementation of Gecko. Camino has always been the OSX optimised browser, but unfortunately they don't have the same level of support and they can't do as much as they would like.

While I have more then enough gripes about the mozilla project, this just comes off whiney. Have you checked Bugzilla? Have you discussed on the Mailing list? Is there a Request for enhancement? Is their code in the repo that is about to drop in an upcoming release?

From memory the firefox UI is coded in XUL, so the actual changes are to the XUL controls, which have to be made as close to identical between all supported platforms. Not in the case of look, but in the scroll gradiant and event chain.

While its easier to take pot shots from your blog and HN you could actually help the situation by advocating it as a priority to the developers by talking to them, by testing code and even contributing. People have already pointed out that most of your complaints are already coming in later versions.

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#28

Post by to3m »

MrJagil wrote: post #17
forgotusername wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to that, I've no problem whatsoever with Mozilla's choice to not implement these (braindamaged without exception, IMHO) features, as these choices are partially what drives me to use Firefox, and the only feedback Apple might ever listen to with regard to drunk scrolling and suchlike is user uptake. Here Firefox enables me to vote with my feet.

Friend, using terms like "braindamaged" is really not that constructive. I've seen an uptake in these kinds of posts lately on HN, and I wish you would all tone it down. Just be polite, rational, constructive and helpful. Only lazy people turn to these spiteful remarks.

But among friends, more flamey rhetoric is acceptable.

Re: Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

#30

Post by dstarh »

Unless I'm mistaking inertial scrolling has nothing to do with it bouncing back specifically, it's inertial meaning having inertia, the tendency for something in motion in this case tr window to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Bouncing when you reach the end would be a simulation of elasticity not enertial
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