I really miss focusing on the details of their desktop product here: About a week ago I tried to switch away from Chrome and back to FF and its been a rough week. Speed wise FF is actually great, absolutely no complaint here, same goes for memory. What I didn't expect and what kind of shocked me is how broken some web pages are on FF. For instance in GMail I can't use Cmd+arrow keys to jump to the beginning or end of a line and on the new Google maps (the one that has been around as a preview for more than a year) zooming by scrolling simply does not work. It's not just Google sites though, I had stutering scrolling on some more complex sites (where Chrome has no issue) and some startup pages have oddly shaped buttons and similar layout issues. It seems like many sites aren't testing on FF anymore.
I really expected FF to be on par with Chrome in terms of rendering quality but that really turned out not to be the case in many small, yet annoying corner cases. They got big by incorporating the quirks of IE and then improving on that, maybe it is time they start thinking about implementing some of the WebKit rendering quirks and go from there.
I really want to keep on using FF and to love it but if it means I have to switch browsers for some of the sites I use daily that will be difficult.
> For instance in GMail I can't use Cmd+arrow keys to jump to the beginning or end of a line
This is a bug in gmail, not a bug in Firefox. In standard browser text widgets, Firefox reads your standard OS X key bindings and treats them properly.
However, Google is unsatisfied with standard form fields, and so they reimplemented their own glitchy, poor-performance, half-broken text widget, which happens to semi-work in Webkit, but not handle shortcuts like cmd-arrows in Firefox. It’s in no way fair to blame Mozilla for that.
This doesn’t address your main point, but Mozilla’s side of the Gmail+cmd bug has been fixed in Firefox 29. Google now needs to remove their mitigation on their side: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341886#c67
tbh I think some of this has less to do with FF and more to do with OSX. (used one for almost three years.)
As far as I'm aware of there is no universal standard that every developer follows on OS X. Some choose CMD + arrow keys, others the classical shell version (ctrl a/ctrl e). Even Apples own apps are (was?) not consistent in this matter.
Nearly all OS X apps use Cocoa and standard Cocoa text widgets. Ones which don’t, such as Firefox, usually try to read the standard Cocoa keybindings and respect them. Firefox actually does a relatively good job with this now (within the past 2 years or so; before that, they didn’t).
Both cmd+arrows and ctrl+a/e should work in almost every text box on OS X.
[Unfortunately, applications like browsers override cmd+arrows to switch tabs or navigate through history or something, depending on context... which is IMO a really stupid and obnoxious choice. Browsers typically use cmd+arrows for back/forward except in a text box, where the text bindings take over. I hate it, because it leads to accidentally going back when the user intends the text box movement command.]
The problem in the GP’s particular case lies with gmail’s custom form field though, which is not a regular text widget, not with Firefox.
I might be wrong but from what I remember from two years ago the constant annoyance of switching keybindings between each app was one of the things that prevented me from becoming a fan of OSX and I really tried. (I think the resident fanboy at that site had an explanation about Cocoa and Carbon(?) keybindings but to dumb me it just didn't cut it.)
The zooming issue may be an OSX problem, but it works fine here on linux. I've also never noticed any rendering problems, websites look like they should. Do you have any examples?
The stuttering during scrolling is probably because firefox is one process, so if lots of javascript is running on the page, it interrupts the process. In general, scrolling is smooth for me though.
This would get a lot better if FF had development tools built in that felt less unfamiliar to people accustomed to the Safari and Chrome dev suites. (Firebug is less bad in this regard, but being built in counts.)
I really expected FF to be on par with Chrome in terms of rendering quality but that really turned out not to be the case in many small, yet annoying corner cases. They got big by incorporating the quirks of IE and then improving on that, maybe it is time they start thinking about implementing some of the WebKit rendering quirks and go from there.
I really want to keep on using FF and to love it but if it means I have to switch browsers for some of the sites I use daily that will be difficult.
Using FF 27 on OS X 10.9.2