“The Macintosh development team of the popular Firefox web browser is currently looking for feedback as to what ‘sucks’ about the current incarnation of the software,” Jeff Smykil reports for Ars Technica. “Colin Barrett, formerly of Adium fame, puts it quite frankly on his blog:”
So, fellow Appleites, I put it to you: What sucks about Firefox on the Mac?
Smykil reports, “Proving they aren’t oblivious to the what Mac users want or how their software is lacking, the post provides a few starter gripes. The list includes native form widgets, Keychain integration, lacking a unified toolbar, and better performance. Colin welcomes you to e-mail him with these gripes, but he is also very interested in some of the more unique issues you have with the browser.”
Full artilce with links here.
Compared with Safari, the dialog boxes, checkboxes and buttons remind me of OS9, or Windows…
It doesn’t behave much like OS X native apps, universal shortcut often doesn’t work, slooowwww launching time!
From my point-of-view Safari w/Saft and Tubesock installed would be a damned near perfect browser IF it didn’t beach ball so much, hog bandwidth, have problems loading certain websites, and if it would steal from Internet Explorer 5 the ability to turn off the playing of sound (or give us a volume control).
Firefox is certainly hella more compatible and lean. But the lack of Keychain integration is a deal breaker for primary usage. And people give so much credit to “extensions”, but let’s be honest do I need 30 different extensions to steal media files? Or 150 extensions that duplicate functions of widgets? Firefox extensions are like Windows software, sure there’s a lot, but of what quality?
Part of the name is “FOX”
That’s an easy one: IT DOES NOT LOOK LIKE A MAC APP!
That’s easy. Bookmark management. I’ve used Firefox on both Windows and Mac systems for a long time. I’ve never understood why bookmarks are so much harder to edit and manage on the Mac version. Why can’t I drag and drop to pull bookmarks around in folders? Or drag and drop folders to move them around? Why can’t I right-click (or ctrl-click) on a bookmark name to rename it? And there’s something funky about the Bookmark editing window itself. You can’t edit lists on the left side, you first have to select the parent folder and edit it on the right side. All just kind of annoying . . .together, they make it painful to management bookmarks in Mac Firefox.
@ Tergenev
Word.
What sucks? I could do without the lockups I get every few days. I could also mention the memory leakage, but Safari is far worse in that regard. I tend to keep my browsers open for days, opening tabs and windows, closing some and opening others (news sites mostly). Soon enough my memory footprint is close to a GB with Firefox, twice that with Safari!
I would like to see a unified toolbar like Camino has. Firefox on Mac looks like Firefox on Windows, and that’s not a compliment.
Poor bookmark management and irritating window re-size behavior combine with that good ol’ Windows feel to make Firefox a little annoying.
and part of the name is “fire”…
Memory leak, memory leak and memory leak. Also, once a Flash object is selected, all keyboard shortcuts only work on the object, so Firefox ignores cmd-W to close the tab/window.
Have I mentioned memory leak?
It doens’t look or FEEL like a Mac app. It’s slow and sluggish. Safari feels snappier, tabbing is better, bookmarking is better, looks way better.
And with a great app like Safari, why do we need Firefox? If Internet Explorer was great, nobody would use Firefox.
Do you really want to make a buck with Macs? Write a MSN IM program that supports audio/video with great quality, that looks and feels like a Mac app, and charge 10 bucks for it.
The first thing I do on a PC after I format it, is to download Firefox, and THEN I download an anti-virus/spyware.
But not on a Mac, I don’t even have FF installed.
I think igniting foxes is just plain cruelty.
It sucks memory
Come to think of it, Safari now makes me cringe. Methinks it’s time to go to the Opera!
The close buttons on the tabs need to be on the left side instead of on the right like a ‘doze app.
Besides memory hogging and crashing (especially with many tabs open), my biggest complaint with Firefox is no page zooming. You can only make the text bigger, but tables and images stay the same size, which messes up the page layout. In Opera, IE7, and iPhone Safari, you can zoom the entire page, pictures & tables & all while preserving the page layout. A very useful feature that Firefox is overdue to have.
Takes forever to launch, and that is on a 2.66 Macpro with 4GB of ram.
I think it’d be great if Firefox could borrow some of the design decisions made by the Camino team. Camino is my browser of choice, used for nearly all my Web activities. If something malfunctions in Camino, then I switch to Safari.
I have Firefox on my system, but I never use it. It feels a little clunky, and the widgets look funny. In fact, they are often hard to see.
Camino is speedy and really looks great! Plus, it’s built around the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, so you’re getting many of the benefits. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have nearly as many features as FF, and the Camino team apparently doesn’t want to give it all those features. So, it would be really great if FF could be made to behave more like Camino.
MW: Zebra, as in “Zebra” has nothing to do with this story!
SLOW SLOW SLOW SLOW SLOW
I’m not fond of the “sheets” for Firefox’ options screens. I much prefer the separate window found on the Windows version. As to the comment above about bookmark editing, even on Windows it’s not so great but there is a great extension called Flat Bookmark Editing which add some super handy features. I would like an easy way to get at the Profile Manager without opening Terminal.
Sometimes it shuts down on me! Just like that!
And, when I open it again, it says ‘New Session’ or ‘Restore Session’.
I’ve got the on my iMac 24″, Mac Pro, Mac mini and on my MacBook Pro. It’s so weird. I even got it at work on my iMac G5.
For those of you complaining about Safari, I suggest dowloading and trying out some of the newest nightly builds of Webkit (nightly.webkit.org). Still some problems, but the speed and memory leakage has improved a heck of a lot.
Yeah Firefox is different, but the interface is intuitive enough to jump right in. It isn’t bad, it’s just not, well, an Apple product.
The Apple look and feel has been part of how I do computing since 1985. Safari is simply more elegant than Firefox that’s all. Would I make it my firefox my default browser. No. not with the current look and feel. Will I keep checking back on the Imrovements being made by Fire Fox. Yes I will.
Do I like it better than Microsoft explore that I have to use every bloody day at work? Emphatically Yes. No question.
one browser no one talks about is flock. they are doing some really innovative development in how we use content. check it out. http://www.flock.com i like to see firefox to incorporate some of these features