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Comment by dror | Hacker News Reader

It is so clear to me that we need to support and promote mozilla and Firefox. They're not perfect, but they, wikipedia, eff, archive.org (who else?) are such an important part of the Internet guardianship in the face of the monopolies, that it's our duty to support them. Doesn't hurt that Firefox is actually a great product.

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> Doesn't hurt that Firefox is actually a great product.

Arguably.

On these threads there is always a handful of complaints about the state of Firefox, mostly on macOS. On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in headless mode without the fans turning on, which never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.

But what kills it for me is their crippled AppleScript support. Firefox is the worst major browser (even worse than smaller browsers) for an automator on macOS. I rely on browser control every day, so Firefox is useless to me.

I’d sooner switch to Safari, which despite laughable controls (can’t even disable JavaScript on a per-website basis) I can do something with.

Yeah, unfortunately, Mozilla has consistently demonstrated over recent years that it doesn't care about Mac users. It's weird, to be honest.

The widespread issues for many, though not all, Mac users, will not make it a ubiquituous browser.

What's even weirder is that a significant proportion of Mozilla's developers use Macs as their main platform (if I recall correctly the most popular platforms are Linux, then Macs and Windows a very distant third).

I use a mac and firefox is my main browser, I don't remember having any problems.

So do I. There are things like text replacement, download progress indication on file icons, and other Cocoa-esque things that don't work on Firefox, but outside a probably very small segment of users who would even notice these things, and a smaller yet segment who would actually care, Firefox feels at home enough in macOS.

What I think damages Firefox's user-friendliness more is how easy it is to get to setting screens that look scary to the average user. For example Firefox recently started recommending an extension called "Enhancer for YouTube" when a user visits YouTube after upgrading to some new version of Firefox. Upon installing the extension, you get taken to the extension's settings screen which has a design that would definitely throw off my non-techie family members [1]. Also, take a look at the Firefox release notes for iOS [2] – sure it's "nice" for us devs to have access to raw GitHub issue labels or whatever those are – but for non-techie users they might be interpreted as conveying a certain messaging that Firefox is not really designed for them.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/8TIetRA.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/QoUG1ZF.png

I think it's crazy how everyone has such different experiences with Firefox on Mac.

I want to love it, but even after a fresh install of MacOS every time I go to use it on my 2015 MBP it grinds to a halt.

I'm sticking to ungoogled-chromium for now. I really hope it's resolved down the line!

Yeah, it seems like there's always this split on every Hacker News thread about Firefox.

Personally, I've use Firefox as my primary browser since before I started using Macs, and after 6 different Macs between home and work, I've never had any problems with it.

From reading a lot of mailing list and bugzilla posts I get the impression that they do care about Macs but the current (very old) renderer is just never going to play nicely with MacOS without a major overhaul, and that major overhaul is Webrender which has been in development for several years but has yet to land in stable because writing a new renderer is just a really large undertaking. Webrender and planeshift should bring a pretty huge performance and power efficiency improvement when they finally land in stable.

That's great to hear. I keep Firefox installed on MBP for dev testing and each time do the update and see if it's worth changing too. Hopefully, the answer will be yes once Webrender arrives and smooth Mac like scrolling.

It has come a long way, and I want to like it, just really hard in its current form.

Just checked it (I have a recommended setup) - it's whooping fast.

I don't know what these commenters are talking about. I've been using FF on Mac for over a year now on 3 different Mac Machines. It's super fast, as good as Chrome. May be you need to reset it or something to get it working properly. The only issue I had with FF is Developer Tools, which are also have improved a lot with latest release, and continuing to improve.

As I noted, the issue affects many, but not all, Mac users. It seems to be a special configuration of display resolution and other factors that can be difficult to replicate. That’s great for you that it’s working, but you shouldn’t discredit this very serious problem for the general user base.

Sorry, it came of stronger than I wanted to. I actually run into high CPU utilization shortly after I posted it. Haven't had it for a full year, may be something in later version got messed up. I did go away after refreshing FF though, so I do recommend trying it to see if it will fix things. I am routing for FF, but it's definitely not perfect.

How close do you think webrender is to landing in stable? I've not heard much about it before.

Hard to say. It's actually already in stable but currently limited to a very specific set of OS/hardware combinations and they're working on gradually adding more. FF67 enabled it in stable for desktop NVIDIA hardware on Windows. AMD and Intel GPUs on Windows and Linux are currently enabled in the nightly channel, presumably MacOS is next on the list once those are stable. Webrender is mostly done and at the stage where there are mostly just lots of little bugs left to fix so it's naturally kind of hard to estimate how long things will take.

They have a webrender newsletter with progress updates usually every couple of weeks, one of the recent posts talks about the release timeline but it's all kind of vague at this point: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/graphics-team-sh...

Yeah, I went and installed Firefox on my home machine after this landed in 67 since I have the right hardware and...

It's SO much fucking better.

Lots of folks on here claiming that Firefox has been just as good as chrome in terms of performance for years, and frankly that's an utter load of BS.

On top tier hardware (and honestly - most hardware in general) chrome was always blindingly fast, and Firefox just wasn't. It was perceptibly slower at just about everything.

It was just annoying enough that I'd always switch back to chrome for personal use.

Not anymore. This last week is the first time I can remember that I honestly can't tell the difference in speed. If anything, Firefox may actually be legitimately beating chrome in terms of speed.

It's been a pleasant breath of fresh air. Google may lose me as a chrome user (personal use at least), which is something I just couldn't have imagined a year ago.

Interesting. Every browser than firefox is useless to me as they have no good support for plugins (addon api's) like tree style tab.

Headless mode maybe, but for regular users I don't think there's many issues.

I'm running firefox as my daily driver on Mojave with no issues whatsoever. Without seeing this thread, I didn't even know there were issues with the mac version.

Just to add to the pile of anecdotal evidence - same here...I switched to Chrome some years ago when the speed difference was just too much to ignore and switched back to FF a couple of months ago after I started realizing the growing firmness of the cold grip Google has on the web more and more...There's absolutely no noticeable speed difference any more, fans on the laptop are as always and it's been smooth sailing since (on Mojave). The only thing that still annoys me when developing is the lack of websocket frame inspection - but as a "regular" user, no issues at all.

> but for regular users I don't think there's many issues.

There are. As an example, complaints of Firefox on retina Macs abound.

> Without seeing this thread, I didn't even know there were issues with the mac version.

Read any recent HN thread on Firefox, and you’ll find more people exposing their issues with Firefox on macOS.

Can you tell me more about what you mean by "browser control" ? What are you wanting to do with automator & firefox?

At the very least grab the URL and title of the frontmost tab. Firefox can’t even do that without finicky GUI automation (i.e. faking key presses).

    On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in 
    headless mode without the fans turning on, which 
    never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked
    it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.

I believe you, but I'm always so confused by hearing this. I use my Mac (2015 MBP) 10+ hours a day, evenly split between FF and Chrome.

Truly is close to an even 50/50 split -- FF is my personal browser and I use Chrome for all work-related tasks.

And they are subjectively indistinguishable in terms of performance. The only exceptions to that statement are, well, Google properties where Google has clearly invested time and money into optimizing things for FF.

One other possible sorta-exception is when I'm using a scaled resolution mode on an external 4K monitor. MacOS warns me, straight up, that these modes will cause performance issues for me and my modest Intel Iris graphics. The whole system's a little sluggish in those modes, and I think FF fares worse than Chrome, but I won't hold that against FF.

FWIW, Safari does feel subjectively more responsive to me when it comes to scrolling and navigating. And I recently spent a few bucks upgrading my PC gaming rig to a 120hz monitor, which makes a massive difference. And I'm one of those weirdos who keeps CRTs around for his old consoles because he enjoys that true zero lag experience. So I am not exactly insensitive to latency. I don't have magic professional gamer golden magic eyes or anything, but it is an area of interest for me.

I think one problem, especially if you have many tabs open, is that about:performance isn't very useful / accurate (at least for me) so I'm not sure which is the offending tab to close. With Chrome that is pretty easy.

When you find the culprits on FF, what do they tend to be? How many tabs do you typically have open? Do you run an ad blocker? Not saying you're doing anything wrong - just genuinely curious about which usage patterns trigger FF to be "slow."

I usually have perhaps 5-15 tabs open in FF and I've really never had a reason to even look at about:performance.

But, I do understand that different people have different usage patterns. I run an ad-blocker and I don't typically have any "heavy" resource-sucking tabs open. Hacker News, old Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, NYT, etc. That kind of thing. Not heavy video/streaming/interactive stuff.

Anecdotally my understanding is that really heavy tab users (like many dozens or even hundreds of tabs) feel/felt that Chrome handed that better than FF.

Too late to edit my post, but "where Google has clearly invested time and money into optimizing things for FF" should read "where Google has clearly invested time and money into optimizing things for Chrome."

Sorry.

Makes more sense :-)

Personally I feel it is worse than that: there have been som issues so bad that I hardly get Hanlons razor to work at all, notably one where just having a search result page open in Firefox would consistently spin up my CPU for no good reason twice a minute.

(Of course there were a number of other weird lagging issues as well.)

Since you use both Chrome and Firefox, do you know if it's possible to import saved passwords from Chrome into FF on Mac? I was able to do it on my work PC but the Mac version of FF didn't show that option.

I've been using firefox as my daily driver on a 2015 macbook air for the last year. It's been fantastic, not at all slow.

I haven't tried to use applescript/automator with it so i can't comment on whether or not that works, but that doesn't seem like the biggest issue for most users, or even most developers.

> I haven't tried to use applescript/automator with it so i can't comment on whether or not that works

It doesn’t. They don’t have a dictionary.

> but that doesn't seem like the biggest issue for most users, or even most developers.

I specifically said (emphasis added):

> But what kills it for me is their crippled AppleScript support.

Though I’m sure I’m not alone, because I have several users (of tools I’ve built that interact with browsers) and fellow developers that share the same complaint.

This is a very powerful JS blocking extension I used for a while: https://jsblocker.toggleable.com/

That extension is deprecated.

Anything Google related running in that Firefox? (Seems like a stupid question since it also happens in headless.)

Only Google-owned website I open is Youtube, and even that I don’t use in the browser (I redirect the URL to mpv).

I already use Firefox on the iPhone. I think it’s better than Chrome. Probably gonna switch on the desktop.

Is there any actual difference between the two beyond UI and sync? From what I understand they're both safari underneath?

I think you meant iOS WebKit for rendering rather than Safari. Firefox iOS uses WebKit while it used to use Gecko.

I seem to remember speed being a difference. It’s been awhile. I also switched from gmail to outlook because gmail was using headers and footers for ads which was annoying on a 4” SE.

>while it used to use Gecko

How was it ever permitted to use Gecko underneath? Have the iOS app rules changed in recent years? Did they used to be more permissive?

Thanks, I was wrong about that. On iOS, Firefox switched to webkit for iOS for rendering (which includes JS). For the desktop, Firefox used and uses Gecko; the desktop version of course came first.

Firefox-on-Store uses Webkit but there is an experimental fork using Gecko/Servo in case Apple allows in the future. You can build and developer-sign that fork for your own.

I would switch today if Mozilla added tab completed search in the address bar that Chrome pioneered. It's very intuitive and difficult to give up.

You have tab completion in the search bar (Ctrl+K)!

Personally I disable the cloud-based suggestions and rely only on my local history.

I hope I don't sound crass, but how much is this feature going to matter to you once Google locks up the web?

Hysteria of HN is hilarious.

What is your argument? It is clearly happening and it is not surprising given Google's business incentives. It's slow enough that there is a large chance of many falling for it, which is what makes it so dangerous.

I'm not sure if this accomplishes what you're looking for, but when I switched to Firefox I had similar complaints and turned to custom keywords:

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

Basically, Firefox allows you to set a keyword (which I often set to an abbreviation + question mark) which you can link to a site's search URL. For example to search Google Scholar I would type my keyword, "sch?" and then my search query, and after pressing enter I am taken to the site's search results. It's a few more steps you have to take, but has the added benefit of allowing you to add the functionality for any site.

Alternately you can switch the default search engine to DuckDuckGo, which lets you use DDG's "bang" search shortcuts (see https://duckduckgo.com/bang) from the Awesomebar. So you just type a search query and then append "!g" to run that search query through Google, "!w" to search for it on Wikipedia, "!yt" to search for it on HN, etc.

Not everyone is understanding what you're saying, as evident by the downvotes you're getting

I'm fulltime FF but I won't pretend that the in-site (site specific) search works as smoothly as it did (does?) in Chrome

In Chrome you would go to foo.com and you would use their search input and from then on, in your address bar you can type foo (or maybe just f, depending on how often you use foo.com), and press <tab> to search within the site

This is a workflow you get used to

For the longest time I wanted this in FF, but I think the real thing that clicked for me was just heavily leaning on duckduckgo's bangs

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

(Firefox does have in-site search, which you can use by right clicking in the site's search input and clicking "Add a Keyword for this Search", but I'm not even sure how it works heh)

edit: okay so this is how it works https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address... and I just added `a` for amazon.com and I typed `a` in the address bar and pressed <enter> and it didn't do anything, hm

edit2: so I guess my main point should have been: Firefox has a manual step for what Chrome did for "free", after you made your first in-site search, which you were probably already going to do

Not everyone is understanding what you're saying, as evident by the downvotes you're getting

Well also I'd like the address bar to be a fucking address bar and not an address-but-sometimes-search bar.

Hm, yeah, probably can't help you there

Minimally you can restore the search bar, and now `ctr-k` will focus that bar, while `ctrl-l` will continue focusing the address bar

HOWEVER.. if you type keywords and not a domain in the address bar, it's still gonna search. That's the rub you don't like, I suppose

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-bar-firefox-...

Here are a few firefox settings to make your URL field behave only as a URL field:

  user_pref("keyword.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.fixup.alternate.enabled", false);
  user_pref("browser.urlbar.suggest.searches", false);
  user_pref("browser.urlbar.filter.javascript", true);

You can put these in a "user.js" file in your profile directory if you don't have one already, or just set them in about:config

FWIW, I believe most if not all of these settings are also available under preferences | search.

Thank you for perfectly illustrating why Firefox will not find the mainstream acceptance of other browsers.

Almost nobody will enable this, though.

It's not like Chrome has an easy and user-friendly way to do the same thing. Quite the opposite: Chrome has no way at all to do this, while Firefox has a technical way to do it even if it's not obvious to most users that it's possible.

How does the tab-to-search feature in Chrome negatively affect how you use the address bar? Are you entering URLs with tabs in them?

It doesn’t negatively effect it. I like it

I was highlighting what I missed when switching over

I'm pretty sure that Opera and Firefox had that search feature before Chrome was even released ?

You're good to go! Just enable it in settings!

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