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0 pointsMaxBarraclough6y ago0 comments

> Privacy is important, but it's a feature, not a product. You still need to have a great product.

Do you consider Firefox to be a less-than-great product?

I use it as my main browser, from Windows 10. No complaints. I don't experience performance issues or UI issues. Chrome and Firefox are both solid browsers, on Windows at least.

Perhaps Firefox for Mac is a weaker product, and loses to Safari 'fair and square' on quality grounds?

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alwillis6y ago

>Perhaps Firefox for Mac is a weaker product, and loses to Safari 'fair and square' on quality grounds?

The current version of Firefox on macOS is a vast improvement over what Mozilla was shipping 6-12 months ago.

However, it still requires more RAM, doesn’t render as quickly and consumes more power than Safari, so there’s that. Also, Safari implemented anti-tracking features before Firefox did.

ripa6y ago

Firefox for Mac has been more or less unusable up until the most recent release where they actually started using the Core Animation libraries in macOS. Now it won’t drain all the battery in no time, and it’s actually quite snappy. I’ve tried to run Firefox so many times in the past, but eventually always go back to Safari because it’s more native, fast and unobtrusive.

catalogia6y ago

> Firefox for Mac has been more or less unusable up until the most recent release

This is a gross exaggeration. I've been using firefox on MacOS for 3 years and it's worked fine the entire time.

GeekyBear6y ago

The issue has been the power draw and heat on newer MacBooks with a Retina display.

Older Firefox versions are redrawing the entire window even if only a tiny portion of the window was changing.

With advent of high resolution windows, the amount of work needed to redraw the whole window for every frame became significant.

The last version of Firefox moved to breaking the window into large tiles and only redrawing the tiles that have changed.

This is still less optimized than Safari (which uses Core Animation to only redraw the items on the page that are changing) but it is still a large improvement over prior versions of Firefox if you have a high resolution display.

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wtetzner6y ago

I’ve been using Firefox on MacBook Pros for the last 9 years, and it’s worked fine.

Royalaid6y ago

I will say that the latest changes on nightly really feel like it is close enough to other browser to be a decent replacement

ken6y ago

Yes, Firefox on the Mac is absolutely a less-than-great product, to put it mildly. That's why I called its UI "lousy".

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