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Comment by partlysean | Hacker News Reader

It’s little things like this that keep me from using Firefox. Context menus, various micro-interactions, visual design decisions—they all feel so non-native.

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I'm using firefox on macos right now and I can't see what the issue is. The the menus show up in the main top bar like every other app. Am I missing something?

Yes.

Pretty sure this bug is about the right-click menu.

I just checked again and the firefox one looks so close to the native right click that I can hardly tell the difference other than it not supporting dark mode

Firefox's engineers have done a remarkable job at trying to mimic the native context menu as much as possible, but it's not a 100% match (as evidenced by your discovery that it doesn't support dark mode). There have also been times over the past two decades where macOS updated something about the context menu that then make the Firefox one not match. The main point is that it really should just be a native menu; they shouldn't be spending time trying to make it match 100%.

I know of a lot of people like that, when presented with very illogical UI decisions, or controls that look absolutely nothing like the rest of the system, they just cannot see what the issue is. I wonder if it’s poor eyesight, lack of attention, or whatever.

And thanks to the 'native ui' purists which you can never satisfy, now we are drowning in webapps and electron. How native does thst feel?

I suspect it’s that they don’t care. It’s not an issue for them because they don’t use the missing native functionality anyway.

Also, if you frequently use cross platform software on multiple platforms, it’s possible consistency within the app is more important than consistently with the OS.

People that come from a Linux desktop background seem to be immune to these things. The rough sandpaper that is open source UI will eventually wear anyone’s awareness down.

I don't really care much about the native menus, but the non-native scrolling in Firefox drives me nuts.

Granted neither of these are deal breakers for me. I don't use Firefox b/c of pretty context menus.

What else do you use?

Last time I used Chrome they pretty much reimplemented everything from buttons to modal sheets.

Safari for all my personal and work usage. I do pop into Chrome and Firefox to perform browser QA, but Safari is my daily driver.

I feel your pain.

But also ended up completely moving out of most "native" tools for a reason or another (from TextMate to VSCode, Mail to Gmail tab, FaceTime to Skype/Meet etc.). At this point deep platform integration looks more like exceptions than the norm, for the better or worse. There are things that I kind of hate in a lot of Apple product (Safari included), which make Firefox's approach a decent tradeoff.

There are so many things that are different between different apps and different OS and I’ve used many of them. Minor variations like this are just to be expected and I don’t feel thrown when I see something different.

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