[Hamuko]

I'm waiting for Firefox to start using a native context menu on macOS instead of the garbage that they are now using and which doesn't behave anything like any other context menu on macOS.

It's luckily on Bugzilla, so I can keep monitoring progress daily.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

[tzs]

There are a couple of other non-native things Firefox does that annoy me.

1. It has its own certificate system. That would be fine if it used that in addition to using the MacOS built in system, but it seems to use it exclusively.

2. It has its own spell checker, which is orders of magnitude worse than the one provided by the native MacOS spell check API. I can't think of any program I've used in the last few years on Mac or Windows that had a worse spell checker.

LibreOffice is open source and its spell checker is fine as far as I've seen--definitely way better than the one in Firefox--so that if Mozilla for some reason needs to have the same spell check on each OS and so can't use the native MacOS one, they could still bring it up to par by copying from LibreOffice.

[Groxx]

>1. It has its own certificate system. That would be fine if it used that in addition to using the MacOS built in system, but it seems to use it exclusively.

fwiw Chrome does this too. It's effectively standard practice for browsers - OSes routinely have very out-of-date cert stores, and don't regularly remove revoked ones. Browsers ship it separately because it's such a major security concern for browsing.

[tzs]

Chrome on MacOS does use the Mac's built-in system. Going to the privacy settings (chrome://settings/privacy), and clicking "Manage certificates" just launches the MacOS "Keychain Access" application.

To get Chrome on MacOS to use my employer's self-signed root certificate, I just had to import it with "Keychain Access" and then both Chrome and Safari used it.

It may also have its own built-in certificate system, but for user-added certificates, it uses the built in MacOS system.

[jve]

On Windows, Chrome uses actually uses windows certificate store.

As for Firefox (on Windows), there is a setting called "security.enterprise_roots.enabled" in about:Config which you can enable or push via GPO.

From docs it appears it works on Mac too: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/setting-certificate-aut...

[lenkite]

No - Chrome uses the OS certificate store on both Windows and MacOS and hence works with all internal apps of enterprises that generate client certificates for their users and manage the OS certificate using strict policies.

Firefox does not.

[pilif]

> LibreOffice is open source and its spell checker is fine as far as I've seen

Curious. Both LibreOffice and Firefox use Hunspell

[aembleton]

and Chrome according to [1]. I guess LibreOffice has a more comprehensive dictionary.

1. https://hunspell.github.io/

[twobat]

> native MacOS spell check API

Which is great when it works. But Romanian (my language) is not supported by Apple (even tough they sell quite many things here).

In fact this is a good example of a dysfunctional company. Apple managed to translate to Romanian most of their help docs but they can't provide a basic spell checker.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Python doesn't use Mac OS X certificates either. E.g the popular 'requests' package carries its own root certificates bundle (extracted from Mozilla, I believe). I haven't investigated this in details but it has something to do with the version of OpenSSL that comes with Mac OS X.

[IanSanders]

>It has its own certificate system

And it's great. If you're running it portable on another machine you don't have to trust its certificates

[tracker1]

On the plus side, at least it allows for newer releases to move ahead of deprecated OS versions... it's a mixed bag.

[marcthe12]

Web browser have a massive NIH issues.

[FullyFunctional]

Hardly surprising for such a massive cross platform project. Catering to the particularities of each platform wastes a lot of effort. I personally really appreciate that Firefox works (mostly) the same on all the platforms I use.

[kqr]

Web browsers have practically become operating systems these days. I'm fully expecting someone to create a web browser web app at some point. Not as a joke, which has obviously been done before.

[cerberusss]

What I don't like, is that it keeps the tab close button on the right. I fix it with a bit of code in UserChrome.css but it'd be great if they would stick a bit closer to the platform. To be fair, except for obviously Safari, most other browsers do the same.

[saint-loup]

I see people (legitimately) complaining about the longstanding lack of support for Mac OS native widgets but personnally I'm equally annoyed with the new behavior of menus.

The standard of basically every OS is that hovering the pointer over an item opens a submenu (if there's one). In Firefox, I have to click, for instance to open "Help" in the burger menu. The sub-menu then appears by replacing the parent, instead of forming a cascade near it. It's non-standard and it's slower.

The only rationale I can see for it is avoiding complex mouse paths and accidental closing of menus for absolute beginners, but still. It's not like it's not an old, solved HCI problem (see question 8). https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

[lucideer]

On the click-vs-hover issue, I actually very much like Firefox's approach, and wish it were more widely used.

W.r.t. it being an "old, solved HCI problem", it isn't. The link you post actually posits positioning solutions to problems inherent to the hover approach. It doesn't discuss hover-vs-click at all, and while these positioning strategies still apply to some degree with the click approach, the problems they solve are much less severe there (namely, the submenu doesn't disappear if the user takes the wrong cursor route to a submenu item).

[user_50123890]

Ticket opened 20 years ago, damn.

[steveklabnik]

There was a very old ticket that was closed recently when a component was re-written in Rust. I can't find a link right this second, but if you could have told the future, it's kinda amusing. "Sorry, we'll fix this, but first we have to invent a new programming language. We'll get back to you in a decade."

Frankly, I think it's pretty amazing that bugs this old end up getting fixed. Not many projects live even live that long, let alone keep up their infrastructure...

[hnick]

> Frankly, I think it's pretty amazing that bugs this old end up getting fixed. Not many projects live even live that long, let alone keep up their infrastructure...

Our internal dev team has changed their feedback/requirements system 3 times in the last few years.

Motion without moving...

[majewsky]

I once fixed a bug in Kolf (the KDE mini-golf game) which was about the ball glitching through walls if you hit them in the right angle. The patch that fixed the issue was rather huge, since I ripped out the home-grown collision detection and replaced it with a standard 2D physics library.

Sadly, my patch broke some custom levels which relied on the glitch. https://xkcd.com/1172/ is more true than you'd expect.

[0-_-0]

I remember the time when I never came across anything on the Internet that was older than 3 years

[michaelbazos]

That would be the first three years of the Internet.

[0-_-0]

I'm pretty sure it was after 1972 :P

[ziftface]

> i can't argue, but it's a time thing

You have no idea

[bashinator]

Wow, that predates OS X.

[aasasd]

Yup.

> Does this bug affect OS X? If not, it should be WONTFIX.

> It does affect Mac OS X.

[ziftface]

I couldn't agree more. Firefox is the only browser I use on the desktop, and I do think it's the best. But the lack of native context menus is annoying.

Also, other native features are missing. Like the rubber banding and pinch to zoom, although that one works okay if you switch the config entry.

[brailsafe]

This was posted not only before OSX, but before Firefox. This was just Mozilla.

[pier25]

Not only context menus, any type of alert is garbage.

[icedchai]

So what would a native context menu actually do for me?

[Hamuko]

Allow the context menu to close when releasing right-click outside the menu for example. There's a ticket for that as well.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101472

[masklinn]

Services is one which annoys me a lot. I have a few around text edition and formatting, not having them in firefox is quite inconvenient.

[catalogia]

In which ways is the Firefox context menu "garbage"? How does it behave differently?

I never even noticed that it's not native until I read your comment, and looking carefully at it now the only difference I can notice is the corners are square (and that is certainly nothing worth complaining about.)

Maybe I'm just an oblivious idiot, but it sure seems to me that a lot of MacOS users on HN love to blow trivial matters completely out of proportion. Application lags for a split second? "Utter garbage, the developers should be shot, I'm going back to Safari." Where is the perspective? If there is something glaringly broken about these context menus, by all means correct me. But to my eye they look damn close to native and they seem to work perfectly fine.

[zapzupnz]

> it sure seems to me that a lot of MacOS users on HN love to blow trivial matters completely out of proportion

Don't be so dismissive. Apart from anything, that breaks one of the HN guidelines for discussion.

Not having access to built-in and user-defined (Applescript/Automator) Services is not trivial; these are a powerful part of what makes macOS unique and a major reason why I continue to use macOS. Their lack of availability is entire down to using faked-up menus rather than proper widgets.

Having widgets behave improperly is also an accessibility issue. There are multiple accessibility APIs built into the system that practically every macOS app built using Cocoa or Carbon hook into automatically; apps that use non-native widgets that don't take enough care to (a) perfectly emulate the behaviour of native widgets or (b) sufficient expose themselves to the built-in accessibility APIs not only make for an unexpectedly unpleasant experience but also potentially are showstopping for people with disabilities.

> But to my eye they look damn close to native and they seem to work perfectly fine

In other words, it's not a problem for you, so it shouldn't be a problem for anybody else.

[catalogia]

> Not having access to built-in and user-defined (Applescript/Automator) Services is not trivial

It's under the Firefox menu. I use it frequently to trigger an Automator service for TTS, which pipes the text through a sed script to fix common mispronunciations. I use this stuff too.

Should it be in the right click menu? Yes. Is firefox crippled by it's absence? No, because that functionality still exists, just in a different location (and if you have your services bound to keyboard shortcuts it becomes a complete non-issue.)

I stand by what I said. I'm not being unreasonably dismissive. Many mac users on this forum in particular have a habit of blowing the slightest defect completely out of proportion. Maybe they're trying to emulate Steve Jobs' infamously toxic approach to critique. Calling firefox "garbage" because of defects these minor is a prime example.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Is firefox crippled by it's absence?

I’ve used Firefox since Chrome started threatening to block ad blockers. I have stopped recommending it.

This specific bug confused the hell out of not only my parents, but also multiple nieces and nephews in their teens. (They thought it crashes.) These age groups both spend most of their time on mobile. When a desktop app behaves unusually, it’s a massive burden.

Not fixing these bugs seems to be a cultural problem at Mozilla, albeit one that’s getting better.

[catalogia]

Both of your parents and multiple teenagers thought firefox was crashing because Services wasn't in the right-click menu?

Forgive me for being incredulous, but what are they using it for? While I use Services, I'm not under the impression that it's particularly common. Perhaps Mozilla haven't prioritized the matter because they, like myself, are wrong about that? (And maybe calling Firefox garbage isn't the best way to correct their cultural blindspot?)

[Hamuko]

They don't close when you release right-click, they don't contain services, they don't select the word you are on.

That's the stuff I've noticed in the couple of days I've been using Firefox.

[dkonofalski]

One of the things that I use a lot that isn't on there is the "Look up" function/service to get the definitions of words from the dictionary, wiki, etc. Super useful and I miss it so much after switching from Safari.

[jeremiahlee]

If you hover the cursor over the word and hit command control d, you’ll get the definition in Firefox.

[dkonofalski]

That's helpful. Thanks. Would still like for it to be in the context menu, though, but this will do in a pinch.

[jhatax]

Another trick if you have the new "Magic" trackpads: Select the word, place three fingers on the pad, press down (force press), and you can see the definition of the selected word (will be highlighted in yellow).

[saagarjha]

Here's one: try right clicking and dragging out. Firefox's menu will open and stay open.