Comment by bhnmmhmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhnmmhmd | Hacker News Reader

(not directly related to the topic)

Firefox (on Mac) lacks three things which I hope they fix them ASAP:

1. Compared to Chrome, FF just makes the Mac insanely hot. Sometimes if a website is stuck at loading, the CPU usage goes seriously high, resulting in temperatures around 80˚ Celsius, and MBP fan rounds at ~5000 rpm.

2. FF doesn't support page scrolling with keyboard shortcuts like Chrome does. On a Mac, you can [big] scroll up/down using alt + arrow keys. "Home" and "End" could also be achieved by Command + arrow keys. On FF however, I haven't found the same shortcuts.

Update: It has a weak form of this feature (but still requires your MBP to have "Home" and "End" buttons on it!): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...

3. FF used to be faster than Chrome at startup, but now on FF 57-58, when you type in the omni-bar, it takes quite a long time for FF to figure out where it has seen this before. In other words, it can't quickly tab-complete what you're typing among bookmarks, history, etc.

I switched from Chrome to FF a while ago, mostly because of the Quantum and the new slick modern UI. But due to these annoying problems, I switched back to Chrome.

On #2, Fn-up and Fn-down are respectively equivalent to page up and page down on the Mac (at an OS level).

Yes, in the "Update" section I addressed that. But still Home and End aren't available.

Edit: The comment below mentions another way to achieve Home/End features in FF.

Are they not? I use Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down to scroll to the top and bottom of a page, respectively, on Firefox.

Also fn-Left and fn-Right

You're right, I just used them and it works. Weird how Mozilla didn't mention it on the link I provided.

They do, but it might be confusing because they list "Home" and "End" first, before the Cmd+Up/Down alternatives.

Agreed. Quantum is still very slow on macOS. My least favorite part is the "whoosh to catch up" highlights following the mouse cursor in about:config on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro.

Quantum is causing me huge problems on Windows 10 machines too, periodically just freezes my machines and tabs just stop working with no errors reported. I was very enthusiastic when Quantum was first released, it seemed like an awesome new FF but not happening, gonna have to ditch it.

You can also scroll up and down just by pressing Space (down) and Shift Space (up) in many Mac applications, particularly browsers and RSS readers

I honestly can't live without a home and end keys.

They destroyed the XPI/XUL platform and thousands of hours of work that went into those extensions. Now Firefox is a much worse version of Chrome, no reason to use it except for dubious ideology preferring Mozilla. Sacrificing the one network effect that kept Firefox relevant was a brilliant move.

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