[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.