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Comment by chrnad | Hacker News Reader

I personally think it's a big improvement over what it was before -- on macOS at least. On macOS, Firefox had always felt a little bit off. Nothing too egregious, but just enough to make it slightly unpleasant (like the non-native context menus). I feel like that has been resolved in this update.

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Since you've already mentioned it - I hear that Firefox has non-native context menus all the time, but for the life of me couldn't tell any difference between "native" and "non-native" context menus. Anybody has any proof/example of this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27273724

Right-click on a word in Chrome/Safari (or really any other macOS application) and right-click on a word in old Firefox.

https://files.grid.in.th/vKeXJQ.png

It looks close, but details and behavior are a bit off. For example:

- Firefox context menu does not respect system's dark mode

- Different horizontal and vertical margins between items

- Different font rendering (e.g. text looks bolder)

- Different right caret icon

For behavior difference, for example: when navigating sub-menu items, macOS uses cursor velocity and cursor direction to determine if user is trying to go to submenu and immediately dismiss it if user is not. Firefox context menu uses a delay to archive similar effect. (To test this: open a sub-menu in a context menu, then move the cursor up. macOS native menu dismiss immediately, where old Firefox has a small delay before it is dismissed.)

And on Big Sur, the old Firefox menus were still using edge-to-edge rectangular selection but the system ones now use rounded-rectangles that appear to detach from the edges.

That tabwrangler extension is great, thanks!

Try streaming a call on MacOS... you'll feel a bit off.

40x the energy usage vs Safari. It's atrocious. Laptop gets to silly high temps, has to be bad for battery life... But I'm sure glad we have some new popup confirmation windows. Cool.

EDIT: I use FF on my Mac as my primary browser. Just so frustrated at how little fucks they give about performance and battery usage.

May I ask why not just use Safari?

I mean, I do for streaming calls.

BUT, I really do like Firefox's ability to clear history and cookies on close. I like the extensions for Firefox... Safari doesn't really have any extensions... not really anyway. Things work funky, if they work at all. I think I run 40+ Firefox extensions for work.

Everything from ClearURLs, to Wappalizer, to Reddit Shine. Nothing works on Safari.

Firefox is great, except they don't give a flying poo about battery life or heat issues on Macs. Really frustrating given we're all mobile these days.

They stopped trying to make menus even look native on other systems.

To be honest, Microsoft has given up trying on Windows as well. Every Microsoft application feels different and MS Teams even ignores the Windows notification infrastructure.

2 wrongs don't make a right.

There is no definite native UI on Windows. If you can point me to one, I might believe you but even the settings menus on Windows use different UIs.

Windows has had a native UI forever. Here's how to use it in assembler

  https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1035362/Simple-Window-With-Assembly

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