First time in a while running Firefox on Mac, and I'm happy to report it finally supports bounce scrolling! In general scrolling is very smooth and performance seems excellent.
Still doesn't feel native at all.
Firefox's scrolling engine is so good, CSS scroll snapping feel more native than Safari's implementation (with chrome feeling the least native - too little friction and takes too long to stop moving on large scroll snap areas) [1].
[1] https://ppg.report/41.876,-87.624 for example of CSS scroll snapping that performs best on Firefox on Mac
Where's that setting?
> Different speed, different acceleration.
Huh, interesting! Are you mouse or trackpad? I'm comparing side-by-side on trackpad and I can't detect any difference. If I flick the trackpad at the same speed they will both land roughly in the same place on the page, and the variation, as near as I can tell, is because of variations in my flick speed.
In both Safari and Firefox I find it basically effortless to scroll exactly where I want to. (This was emphatically not true for me in previous versions of Firefox.) Feels totally natural. Though maybe there is a difference I'm just not sensitive enough to detect!
FWIW, I'm on Firefox 104.0.2, macOS 12.5.1, MB Pro / M1 Max.
(Spark, which is a supposedly-native email app, somehow has weirder feeling scrolling to me than Firefox.)
I’m on M1. Just updated FF from the menu.
I’m using the trackpad, but again, I changed my system settings, as I don’t like the default speed and acceleration.
> I changed my system settings, as I don’t like the default speed and acceleration
I see, that could make sense, if Safari was honoring those changes and Firefox wasn't, in some way. I've got mostly stock settings (slightly bumped up speed and three-finger drag) and it feels spot-on.
The current safari bounce effect bounced ALL fixed elements when you bounce the page body. And by copy that. It basically make youtube(or probably any similierly designed website) unusable for anyone have motion sickness. Because the most part of UI is fixed. And hense it is part of "Reduce motion" setting.
Side notes: Safari agreed that bouncing fixed elements is a bug after Firefox implemented it. So this effect will probably be reverted later.
– Bounce effect IS disorienting for some people in some contexts. Hence the decision to disable it in line w/ "Reduce motion" pref.
– On YouTube, Safari bounce-scrolls the whole page, whereas Firefox just bounce-scrolls the scrollable part. I agree the Firefox behavior seems better here (and it sounds like Safari might adopt it).
Firefox never felt native. Typography is different from my system settings, window color is different, mouse behavior different, scrolling behavior is different, spacebar to scroll jumps, zoom is weird.. actual size is 125%. So I always have to zoom out a few times to get to 100%, and it doesn't remember those settings.
The only reason I use firefox sometimes is because I can use different profiles as tabs in the same window. For those pesky apps without multi-account / account-member-user schema.
I used to love firefox 15+ years ago.. when I was still on windows, and IE was really bad, but switched to chrome the moment it came out.
My understanding is all of the browsers contain a lot of custom widgets. Like, Safari is not drawing text using NSTextView or whatever.
Looking at Firefox and Safari side-by-side they look pretttty similar to me. Some very slight text rendering differences, and Firefox is maybe a touch less smooth to scroll than Safari. The bounce-scroll is a little bit more stiff.
I recorded a video if you want to see what I'm seeing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkAy0O5EDs
There are so many different widget implementations out there now, maybe I'm just losing my sense of what "native" is. But the scroll physics feel right to me, the text looks right, the text selection and input and shortcuts all work...native enough for me!