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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

This is so close to great but can a mac snob ask how to get a more consistent UI experience out of firefox? I'm totally happy with how everything behaves inside the web panel but:

  1.  At a minimum I'd be happy with a toolbar icon set that was a little more in step with OS X design (but willing to hear 
      if I just have misunderstanding of design :D)
  2.  As a reach, os-native menus or at least more native-style menus for things like the toolbar menu

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Interesting. I'm on mac, and I'd say I'm usually pretty sensitive to native widgets, but for whatever reason the toolbar and the menus don't bother me at all. Overall it has a very clean feeling to me. Maybe just because I've gotten so used to browsers being their own little world.

What does drive me crazy is

1. not having bounce scrolling

2. not live-panning the page when using a swipe gesture to go back

Bounce scrolling, especially, I think is table stakes if you want to take the Mac seriously.

Yeah those are good items too. The compact view from elsewhere in this thread was a huge step up. I still feel like the "weight" of the icons is heavy compared to chrome / safari / photos / finder / etc, and I'd rather native menus than the custom non-native ones, but I can live with this.

I have similar remarks. On OSX, the tab and the url bars are too big, they seem out of place.. Also, the black tab bar seems strange to me as I have a black OSX menu bar..

You can make the tab bar and url bar smaller by going to the menu > customize > density > compact.

Thanks! By the way, for those who read this, to change the theme is menu > customize > theme.. These things are not easy to find!

Thank you so much. That change, combined with the switch to the Light theme, makes Firefox so incredibly better on macOS.

yeah this was such a huge step up, thanks so much. that circled back button was especially driving me nuts so that going away instantly improved my take on this :D

And I would add to this, if it is possible, integration with keychain

This was possible until today and FF57 with the "Keychain Services Integration" plugin -- but it can't be ported to WebExtensions.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keychain-serv...

I will miss it and I'm not sure what to do next.

I have all my passwords in OS X Keychain too (why would you use an external password manager when your OS comes with a perfectly good one). I did not switch from Safari to Firefox until I discovered above addon many years ago, and I won't upgrade to 57 until Mozilla either fixes the SDK so the addon can be ported or (better) integrates into OS X Keychain like a well behaved Mac application should.

I think most people here use more than 1 non-mobile OS?

I assume this is in reference to using the builtin macOS keychain? It syncs just fine to iOS as well if you use iCloud Keychain. That's obviously not possible with Android, but you don't necessarily need a 3rd party password manager if you're only using Apple products.

Agreed, totally open to give this a try but there is no way I'm porting all my passwords over

This to me sounds like something Firefox itself should do, not an extension author...

Problem is: Firefox doesn't.

If only they'd put all the effort spent into trying to imitate macOS into actually building an AppKit version... I guess that's never going to happen due to the cross platform nature of Firefox, but it also means (among other reasons) I'll never use it as my primary browser.

There used to be a MacOS native Mozilla browser [1] called Camino. It was kind of killed by Safari, though.

[1] Or is it a "macOS native mozilla browser", these days? everything seems to lose its uppercase.

Firefox uses Cocoa/AppKit extensively. It doesn't "imitiate macOS": it actually uses the system APIs throughout.

The one thing it doesn't do is to use native widgets to render the UI of the browser chrome. Using native widgets for Web content in a cross-platform browser isn't a very attractive proposition, because native widgets either can't be composited at all (Windows, GTK+) or require that you delegate your entire graphics stack to the OS-specific compositor for Web content (macOS). Delegating the entire graphics stack to Core Animation would prevent us from making any improvements to it (for example, WebRender). Given that a lot of browser UI (e.g. preferences) is becoming Web content in both Chrome and Firefox, for consistency's sake it seems better to use the same widgets for chrome and content.

I completely understand the reasons, but the result is an application which does not feel and behave like a native macOS application. It is a lot better than all the Electron crap out there for sure, but it's still a major reason why Firefox can't replace Safari for me.

I think the light theme feels much more 'native' on macOS, especially in Nightly where they've added the same 'vibrancy' effects they use on the standard theme[1]. That said, a few things like the Photon-style menus and the lack of bouncy scrolling make it feel a little out of place.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/TrRyhLU.png

I'd like it to be able to use certificates in the user's login keychain.

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