TheCoreh

Hi there Mozilla team! :)

My question is about the Firefox user experience on OS X.

I've been a Mac user for a couple years now. Before that, I used Firefox on Windows. When I made the switch to OS X, I eventually gave up on using Firefox because (at least in my opinion) it doesn't feel as native as the other browsers.

I wanted to know: Why is the browser not well integrated with the native features in OS X?

Here's a couple examples:

• Lion came out in 2011. It took one year or more for Firefox to support the full screen mode, and another year for it to support the fading/invisible scrollbars. It doesn't yet support rubber-band overscrolling like Safari and Chrome. Obviously Safari is gonna support everything from day 1, since it's made by Apple, but IIRC Chrome got support for those features only a couple weeks after the 10.7 release.
• Firefox does not support three fingers tap to define a word in the dictionary.
• Firefox does not support pinch to zoom.
• The tab dragging/tearoff experience on OS X is not good when compared to Safari and Chrome: Both have smooth animations/fade effects, while Firefox displays a broken rectangular thumbnail of the page.
• While gestures for back/forward are supported, there's no visual feedback of the gesture to the user like on Chrome and Safari.
• Firefox doesn't use the native notifications feature from OS X, instead rolls out its own notifications. (Chrome is guilty of this one, too)
• Until recently (haven't checked on that, so it might have been fixed), Firefox downloads didn't show up in Finder with nice progress bars on the icons, like Safari and Chrome downloads.
• The right click menus displayed by Firefox are not real right click menus, because they do not blur the background content like menus from native applications.
• While the main Firefox UI has been updated to support Retina Displays, a lot of the assets are still not available in high resolution. For example, the preferences icons are pixelated.
• The help button on the preferences pane is not a standard OS X help button, but an icon designed to look like the purple button from OS X 10.6, and not updated ever since.
• The "resizing" animation on the preferences pane runs on a slower frame rate than the preferences panels of native applications.
• The main app Window has no minimum size, so you can scale it down so it looks like a broken square.
• The "customize" panel of the toolbar doesn't come down with a nice, 3D sheet animation like the "customize" panel of every native app on OS X.
• Select HTML elements switch to a Windows 95-like theme whenever you apply CSS background colors to them.
• The "Pulse" animation on dialog's default buttons is not as smooth as on native apps.
• Cmd+Left and Cmd+Right do not go to the beginning of line and end of line on rich text fields like on Gmail.

I know most of those issues are caused by the user interface not being made directly in Objective C, but instead built upon XUL. I'm not asking why they currently happen on a technical level, because I'm also fairly certain it would be possible to patch XUL to fix all of these.

My question is more on a management/priority level. i.e. Why is the Firefox UX in OS X not a high priority for Mozilla?

PS: I don't mean to say that the Firefox UX is bad everywhere. To me this feels like an isolated problem in OS X. If I had to rate, from my personal experience, the quality and integration with the platform, both in terms of experience and look and feel, I'd say Firefox is absolutely great on Linux, good on Windows and Android and not good at all on OS X.

Thanks!