Firefox: Not A Good Citizen on OS X Lion

Firefox is not a good citizen on any OS other than Windows.<p>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 this has gotten better in recent releases.<p>But most Apple apps like Safari and iTunes aren't good citizens on Windows, either.<p>Anyway, I think we should have a bit of leniency on web browsers. Part of the reason for the perceived incompatibility is that a web browser is not an ordinary app. A web browser is an environment in which most people spend most of their time. It's almost like an OS in itself, with its own UI paradigms such as tabs and add-on bars. Therefore browser designers put in a lot of effort trying to polish their UI exactly the way they want, and it's not easy to reconcile that with the native UI of several different OSes. It'll take time, especially since all the OSes are in the process of revolutionizing their own UIs.

For what it's worth,<p>1. Lion/iOS-style scrollbars are currently enabled on the nightly builds of the "UX" branch, and will hopefully be merged into the mainstream release soon.<p>2. Lion-native fullscreen landed in Firefox 14, which is the current "Aurora" build. It will enter Beta in 6 weeks, or Stable in 12 weeks.

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.

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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.

Wow, it seems like he read the release notes for Firefox 13 (now in beta) and wrote a rant about how those features aren't in 12. See <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/13.0beta/releasenotes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/13.0beta/releasenotes/</a>.

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.<p>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.

An aside: Lion's fullscreen support is awful. I have my TV hooked up to my computer and can't fullscreen anything that uses Lion's fullscreen API.<p><a href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17941/how-do-i-run-an-app-in-full-screen-mode-on-os-x-lion-on-my-second-monitor" rel="nofollow">http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17941/how-do-i-run-...</a>

I have to say, while Chrome has a few issues on OSX, I was really impressed with how quickly they added full screening, Lion-style scrollbars, elastic scrolling, and surprisingly polished two-finger swipe gestures. Hopefully Firefox will get up to speed soon.

I find Firefox has much smoother scrolling for me on OS X, compared to Chrome. The rubber band effect for me normally is quite a slowdown.

That's generally the problem when multi-platform software wants to "feel" the same on every platform. It just doesn't work. Mac users are used to a different UI, so even if you think that you approach is better, just don't do it. When it comes to usability, try to do it how everyone else developing for the platform is doing it.

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?<p>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...

For what it's worth, the rubber band thing having a patent on it, I am not sure shipping it in Firefox is only about implementing it. I do know sometimes patches wait in bugzilla for legal approval, and I do know implementing native-like features often involve much more work than most people think. It makes me a bit sad to see that people judge the entire browsing experience in term of how native it feels rather than how well standards are implemented and what actual features are provided (not the look of a scrollbar, which is a matter of taste and generates debates that don't interest me much). There is some work in progress for more UI smoothness in firefox. Using xul instead of native UI has its pros and cons, but reducing the dependencies between UI code and the OS-specific APIS enables Firefox to be available to many platforms which is valuable in my opinion. It looks to me like people in general prefer to complain on blogs and comments rather than doing the same on bug trackers were it is actually useful and where one can get feedback from the guys that actually know about the stuff.

Since fullscreen and disappearing scroll bars both suck, and inertial scrolling appears to work fine for me, this article is moot.

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

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

I'm curious if there are any statistics on what percentage of Firefox users are on OSX.<p>Perhaps we can approximate. Here's Firefox's user feedback dashboard:<p><a href="http://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?q=&#38;product=firefox&#38;version=--&#38;date_start=&#38;date_end=" rel="nofollow">http://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?q=&#38;product=firefox&#38;v...</a><p>According to this, it looks like 5% of Firefox users are on OSX (or at least 5% of the users who care enough to submit feedback). I've heard (anecdotally) that Mozilla <i>is</i> planning on supporting the features mentioned in the OP, but perhaps it's just not a high priority due to the percentage of their total users that it would benefit (of course, this is a circular argument).

As much as I hate to say it, Firefox is not that good on Windows either - I'm kind of tired of it using 1.5 GB of RAM and lagging most of the time. If not for the awesome Adblock and NoScript plugin and the AwesomeBar, I'd use Chrome all the time...

wow, this page sets 20 cookies, loads 16 external javascripts, and has a 280kB image file in the banner. Just to deliver 7 paragraphs of text.

What bothers me most is that if I'm using multiple desktops in OS X, Firefox is in all of them. There's no defence of this as a UX decision.

The only good browser for mac is chrome.