You mean UI issues with Firefox, compared to Safari? Gosh, where to start?
- Standard keyboard shortcuts for text editing still don't work. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.
- The toolbar(s) don't look or work like standard toolbars. The standard toolbar editor is missing, too.
- Tabs don't look or act right, either. They're actually styled like Windows XP tabs.
- The scroll bars look good, but scrolling doesn't work the same as any other app. It hits a solid wall at either end.
- The preferences dialog is not a dialog, but a web browser tab (!), and its controls all look strange. They're not like standard OS controls or standard web controls. They're mostly just words floating on empty space, and some of them happen to be clickable. (It doesn't even have the advantage of being a webpage: the back button is enabled, but don't take me back to the last thing I was looking at here.) Some settings open a (custom, of course) dialog-in-a-tab, which is resizable, but if you resize it, the main scrollbar disappears, so you can't see the bottom of the dialog with the Cancel/OK buttons.
- It doesn't use the standard localization setting. It has its own, but half of Firefox doesn't even seem to use that, because even though my System Preferences is English, and my Firefox language preference is English, and even my Firefox content preference is English, it's showing half the UI in Japanese still. The context menu is half English and half Japanese!
- It's got a whole second menu (!) in the toolbar, with no way to hide it (see above: non-standard toolbars). The font, text alignment, highlight color, icons, and animation are all non-standard. Of course, it doesn't obey the system accessibility settings, either.
- Tree controls (e.g., in the History window) are non-standard, and standard keyboard shortcuts don't work here, either.
- It uses a (custom, of course) pop-over as an upgrade notification, which can't be dismissed by clicking outside them. Or dismissed permanently, like normal notifications.
The whole reason I use a Mac is for consistency. That's been its primary benefit since 1984. Instead of learning 10 completely different different programs, I just have to learn the common parts once. (Remember those keyboard overlays for the IBM PC we used so we didn't have to memorize which F-key meant "Save" in each different program?) In Firefox, everything is custom, and works differently than other apps. The keyboard, mouse, display, menus, windows, and controls are all weird. If I were OK with that, I'd switch back to Linux.
Yeah, it’s kind of depressing how much better it could be with just a touch of Cocoa; these shortcomings are readily apparent so it wouldn’t even take that much to improve it. I wonder if Mozilla could solve this by just hiring someone who’d focus on improving platform UI to the point where it was competitive with Chrome…
The settings page is still non-standard, the same for the scrolling, keybindings don't work in the usual macOS way (CMD+Q for instance quits only if you hold, which is baffling), the app updates itself in a non-obvious way, the top-bar is laggy when in fullscreen mode, and the list can go on and on.
> It doesn't use the standard localization setting. It has its own, but half of Firefox doesn't even seem to use that, because even though my System Preferences is English, and my Firefox language preference is English, and even my Firefox content preference is English, it's showing half the UI in Japanese still. The context menu is half English and half Japanese!
i have way too many tabs open at all times, and chrome makes it way way easier to see what I have open and get to the tab I want quickly.(it just shows more tabs than Firefox, this is my main complaint) The top bar uses less vertical real estate and is just much cleaner overall. I can see more if not all of the url. Chromes next tab left, next tab right, and close tab, automatically map to the keyboard shortcut I set in macOS, and I still haven’t even found the menu option for next and previous tab in Firefox. (I’m sure it’s there and I just haven’t found it yet, but if it’s not there, that’s a deal breaker for me)
I very badly want to use Firefox as my main browser, and I have it installed and give it a go every now and then, but it’s just not all the way there yet for me.
The vertical space you can easily fix by opening the hamburguer menu > customize > density (bottom left) > compact. It then uses less space than chrome. You can also add/remove items from the top bar there, making your address bar larger if you want to.
The default hotkeys for next/prev tab are cmd+option+left/right arrow. I don't know how to change those...
i use ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab for tabbing. easier 1-handed operation and closer to other "change context" shortcuts like next/prev window (cmd-~, cmd-shift-~) and select desktop/space (ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc).
yeah, I'm muscle-memoried into cmd-' and cmd-; for tabbing right and left, I like using those keys, and this is across pretty much everything I use (I suppose chrome and terminals, mostly..). It's firefox, there's probably an extension for it, but that takes work to find and feels kludgy.
In the mac settings about keyboard/shortcuts, you can define program specific shortcuts; e.g. take the exact name from the firefox menu for the 'next tab' action and give the shortcut you want.
Right, so that's part of my gripe. in keyboad shortcuts, i've got global (all applications) shortcuts for select/show next/previous tab. Those dont map to firefox. Fine, but Firefox doesn't have a menu title for next tab, so setting a shortcut for a non-named function doesn't work. I've tried the documentation(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...), using "go one tab to the left" doesn't work. It's just way more effort to figure out than it needs to be for a browser in 2019.....
- Standard keyboard shortcuts for text editing still don't work. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.
- The toolbar(s) don't look or work like standard toolbars. The standard toolbar editor is missing, too.
- Tabs don't look or act right, either. They're actually styled like Windows XP tabs.
- The scroll bars look good, but scrolling doesn't work the same as any other app. It hits a solid wall at either end.
- The preferences dialog is not a dialog, but a web browser tab (!), and its controls all look strange. They're not like standard OS controls or standard web controls. They're mostly just words floating on empty space, and some of them happen to be clickable. (It doesn't even have the advantage of being a webpage: the back button is enabled, but don't take me back to the last thing I was looking at here.) Some settings open a (custom, of course) dialog-in-a-tab, which is resizable, but if you resize it, the main scrollbar disappears, so you can't see the bottom of the dialog with the Cancel/OK buttons.
- It doesn't use the standard localization setting. It has its own, but half of Firefox doesn't even seem to use that, because even though my System Preferences is English, and my Firefox language preference is English, and even my Firefox content preference is English, it's showing half the UI in Japanese still. The context menu is half English and half Japanese!
- It's got a whole second menu (!) in the toolbar, with no way to hide it (see above: non-standard toolbars). The font, text alignment, highlight color, icons, and animation are all non-standard. Of course, it doesn't obey the system accessibility settings, either.
- Tree controls (e.g., in the History window) are non-standard, and standard keyboard shortcuts don't work here, either.
- It uses a (custom, of course) pop-over as an upgrade notification, which can't be dismissed by clicking outside them. Or dismissed permanently, like normal notifications.
The whole reason I use a Mac is for consistency. That's been its primary benefit since 1984. Instead of learning 10 completely different different programs, I just have to learn the common parts once. (Remember those keyboard overlays for the IBM PC we used so we didn't have to memorize which F-key meant "Save" in each different program?) In Firefox, everything is custom, and works differently than other apps. The keyboard, mouse, display, menus, windows, and controls are all weird. If I were OK with that, I'd switch back to Linux.