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Comment by eightyone | Hacker News Reader

I want to like Firefox, I really do, but the experience on OS X is awful. It doesn't fit well with the aesthetic of a native Mac app, and certainty doesn't' function like one. Multi-gestures in Safari are so much smoother. About a month or so back when the Firefox team was soliciting feedback for something here on HN, one of the designers or developers at Mozilla had screenshots of a version of Firefox that looked really good. I went to go download the latest version and realized that the screenshots most have just been Photoshop comps or something.

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I would have to agree with most of what is said here. I prefer Chrome (or even Safari) over Firefox on OS X. Chrome is faster (I need to work on a slow Internet connection many times) while Safari being the bundled browser has few features like Reader etc. which I don't want to use. I still have FF installed for back up purposes but I don't use it unless something is broken on Chrome or Safari (which doesn't happen a lot).

I find it extremely surprising that some sites (ex:Facebook) are (or were a few months back) displayed differently on Windows FF vs OS X FF.

did it look like this [1]? that's the UX nightly available at [2]. it's a new theme they're working on, but it's got a few versions to go before it makes it into stable. i'm loving it, but they're removing/changing a couple of customization features so people are freaking out. we'll see what the final product ends up looking like.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Gfns2MS.png

[2] http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/

It's not just the user interface, it's that (for example) they don't QUITE completely ignore mac (emacs) keybindings (e.g. ctrl-a should move to beginning of PARAGRAPH, but either moves to the beginning of the visual line in the textbox, or highlights whatever you've searched for if you're that unlikely). This is far worse behavior, and it's been like this for years!

Oh, interesting. That's what Thunderbird looks like now. I was just noticing the other day that Thunderbird got really nice looking suddenly...

That rounded tab just looks off to me. Everything else looks great though.

That's hardly a good Mac UI. On the Mac:

1. Tab close buttons should be on the left, not the right.

2. They got the tab title right, in the center, but site icon should be right next to the site title, not on the far left.

Be aware that the UX alpha is highly unstable. Many things are not finished and from time to time just appear and vanish out of thin air.

So it can only be used as a direction indicator and as such, I think it looks good.

Actually this tab style dates back to at least Firefox 3. I didn't check further back. It looks like XUL can't do it the right way, and they don't care enough to do it right.

It seems like sometimes the play with it and go back to the old one (which I actually like...).

BTW, the UX alpha is back to the old style.

I think the reason they have the icon/close button switched is because when you pin a tab it goes on the left side of the screen.

Yes! Thank you. While I don't think it looks or feels perfect yet, it at least shows that FF is still in the game working on things like this.

The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document).

You can do that using a custom key binding in ~/Library/KeyBindings.

Firefox ignores this and still insists on home/end working on the full document. But even worse: in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works (it does in other Textareas - no idea what Google did here).

Now this might totally be a case of http://xkcd.com/1172/ but by the life of me, I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line - especially when the keys that I usually use are so destructive (scrolling all the way to the top, making me lose my position).

This is the only reason why using Firefox is out of the question.

In the past, I patched some JS file inside the bundle, but now that Firefox updates so often and it's a signed binary, I can't really do that any more.

>The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document)

That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing (and since Windows is the overwhelming presence, is commonly misunderstood as the keys themselves meaning that) and since most early Linux desktop environment's aimed to duplicate Windows, is also the default Linux behaviour now.

You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well.

> I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line

Anything that doesn't override Cocoa's default key bindings will be able to use the emacs key bindings as well (Cntrl-A for the beginning and Cntrl-E for the end of the line)

>in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works

cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.

>That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing

Is it? I'm used to them going to the beginning and the end of lines on Linux.

>and since most early Linux desktop environment's aimed to duplicate Windows, is also the default Linux behaviour now.

The very next line you quoted tells you why that is the case on Linux now. if you used Linux in the late 90's, you will remember that a lot of the popular window managers/desktop environments aimed to make your transition from Windows 95 easier and the current Linux behaviour is a result of that.

I'm not talking about GUIs. I mean in text editors and at the Terminal.

> You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well.

not on my machine. As I said, I used ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to change it. If the OS provides a way to change defaults, I expect applications to respect that too - no matter the historical reasons.

> >in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works

> cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.

Yes, but Command-Left/Right is something that worked on the Mac even since before OSX. I, again, see no reason why it wouldn't work here.

If the application overrides the defaults (which is fairly common ), your changing the defaults does nothing (for that application and for the keys that might have been overridden). It sounds like Firefox overrides the defaults completely but in it's override "map" keeps some of the functionality the same as the default.

I havn't used it but this claims it will change the Firefox behaviour as well (specifically make them behave like windows for the home and end keys)

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

I think cmd-left and cmd-right are used by Firefox for " back" and "forward" so those never work on Firefox (unless perhaps you go find where Firefox specifies its key bindings and change them)

Better link

http://www-archive.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#keys

sounds like

cmd_beginLine cmd_endLine

are what you need to modify in the example given

  <binding id="editorUser">
    <handlers>
      <handler event="keypress" key="w" modifiers="control"
       command="cmd_deleteWordBackward"/>
    </handlers>
  </binding>

Home/End go to the beginning/end of a page on linux/windows. (Unless you are referring to the behaviour in a text area).

CMD-Arrow (left,right,up,down) will move you to the beginning of the line, end of line, start of document,end of document respectively. I really miss these keys when I am on windows as I find it much less of a hand movement to do.

Yeah. It just doesn't work in Gmail's new compose window in Firefox. No idea why.

> ...new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works (it does in other Textareas - no idea what Google did here)

It drives me crazy too. At one point I used a workaround mentioned in the bug discussion[1], but I have no idea if it still works. I decided to support Mozilla/Firefox and just got used to control+a/e within Gmail.

[1]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289384#c63

We're actually very far along in implementing what you saw in those screenshots.

You can download a Nightly build of it (that auto-updates) at http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/

Since Camino is based off Firefox, is it possible to backport some of the OS X specific code? The primary reason why I'm still using Safari rather than Firefox is because it lacks Keychain support.

There have been two attempts that I know of (and probably more) to add keychain support to Firefox, once leveraging Camino’s code. The problem wasn't technical, but resistance from Firefox leadership to the idea. IIRC they were concerned about breaking the ability to move a profile folder from one OS to another.

Couldn't disagree more. I think Firefox looks and feels great.

I'm not a Mac fanatic, which might be why I prefer FireFox on Mac to other browsers.

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