Comment by cecexacjrgec

13 hours ago

Yeah. It’s a tough balance to achieve but that’s the situation we’re in right now so Mozilla really ought to step up (and I totally wish they would).

My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.

Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.

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cecexacjrgec

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II2II  10 hours ago

Behaving like a native application also has tradeoffs. If you're only working on one platform, then sure you will want it to behave like a native application. If you're working on multiple platforms, chances are that you're going to value consistency. And while macOS users prefer their UI, the same can be said of Linux and Windows users. Guess which one is going to win out there.

takeda  12 hours ago

Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy but using work provided mac with firefox for 15 years I never noticed UI being disjointed from the system any more than Chrome.

  • cecexacjrgec  3 hours ago

    > Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy

    Maybe you’re too preoccupied trying to discredit valid criticism as “fanboyism” to realise how important UI and UX are for products such as browsers.

    Besides, Chrome itself is already an absolute mess of conflicting and downright distasteful UX choices and patterns. Firefox seems to be stuck in the past but Chrome seems to actively DESPISE being available on Mac.

josephg  13 hours ago

What aspects feel foreign on macOS? The Firefox preferences for sure. Anything else?

  • weikju  12 hours ago

    Tab close buttons are on the right (windows style) instead of on the left (macOS style), for one.

    • cecexacjrgec  4 hours ago

      Not only that, but general colours are system-like but offputtingly different (dark theme is different from Mac dark theme just enough to be unsettling). Spacing (padding, margins, etc) is uneven on a lot of options, toggles and fields. Swipe back/forth being a simple arrow on the corner of the screen instead of full page swipe (like Safari) in the year of our lord 2026 is a complete disgrace (yes, chrome does this too, yes chrome also sucks). Press CMD+F and just watch as a search bar that hasn’t been updated to modern visuals in about 20 years pops up at the bottom. Pretty much everything around Firefox feels like a random collection of Windows and Linux behavioural patterns mashed together like a digital Frankenstein monster.

      And despite what many people here like to think: these things matter. UX improvements compound exponentially, and so do UX problems. Firefox has an opportunity here to be a first-class citizen on every OS it runs on. It has the opportunity to be the browser that respects your OS choices no matter what, but alas, Firefox seems rather content carrying its “ah yeah I remember using it back in ‘06” reputation.

      Firefox is not a bad browser by any means, but it feels like Firefox is the browser equivalent of the “how do you do fellow kids” meme. An out-of-time experience pretending to blend in under the guise of “AI”.