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Comment by rpgbr | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Firefox were a better citizen on macOS. Its weird text treatment, basic stuff such ignoring snippets substitutions, text navigation conventions (Option + arrow, for instance), are deal breakers to me. I’d gladly use Firefox as main browser if all these little details worked as expected for any macOS app.

For now, I’m sticking to Safari, which is fine as well, and (not surprisingly) works like every app should word on macOS

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My main peave using FF on macOS is full-screening it is a terrible experience - unlike Safari, etc, moving the mouse to the top of the screen causes all the chrome (tabs, URL bar, etc) to shift down (and reveal some useless gap). That's not normal behavior, and should have been fixed 5 years ago.

Also, once you use Safari tab groups + tab preview its hard to go back to FF.

>full-screening it is a terrible experience

The extra bar from the mouse-over is kind of silly but, a TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE?

Yes, it should be fixed though.

Its very terrible, because the UI actually shifts away from your mouse when you are about to click on something.

You're still using Safari when you use Firefox on Mac. Mozilla could perhaps give more attention to bugs in the chrome, but it's understandable they allocate fewer resources to a platform that will never see Firefox's rendering.

You're confusing macOS and iOS. Only Firefox on iOS uses WebKit due to App Store rules.

Thanks for the correction.

> You're still using Safari when you use Firefox on Mac.

That's true of iOS, not of macOS.

Firefox’s handling of fonts, both within the browser itself and with its rendering of webpages, is my biggest issues with it. In Windows the difference in font representation in the address bar between FF and Brave/any Chromium browser is enough to put me off using it.

Fully agreed. On top of that, no right click “Look Up” menu (standard on macOS) and no vertical tabs*

* The TreeStyleTab extension (I think was the name) is pretty bad. For example, it doesn’t restore the tab hierarchy on restart.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

They finally fixed the spacing issue with the default San Francisco font, which was left completely broken and disgusting looking for over two years. But it still renders differently than Safari and Chrome, which you'll notice if you open a Github page for example and quickly flip between the two windows.

For whatever reason Firefox likes to make everything a little bolder and more spaced out, and on top of that doesn't seem to support the most widely used anti-aliasing CSS properties.

I resorted to injecting -moz-osx-font-smoothing in userContent.css on websites I visit frequently that look particularly bad.

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