Mac OS X integration with Firefox
26 December, 2012 § 14 Comments
As I’ve been researching potential Spring 2013 capstone projects, I’ve been looking in to Firefox’ current OS X integration. This includes what parts need improving as well as are currently missing.
With the help of many people in the Mozilla community, I’ve received lots of feedback as to what could be improved. Below is the list of work needed that I have come across.
[P1]
Accepting click events in the titlebar area
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647216
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625989
Keychain support
Lion Scrollbars
Edge bounce and overscroll
Fullscreen mode improvements (Now that Lion fullscreen has been implemented, what is still needed here? - Jared)
Swipe/gesture support is buggy (bug 673675)
Dock Download Progress
[P2]
Lion resume support
Auto-fill from Address Book
Use the system provided spell checker
Text autocorrection
Built in word definition panels
Investigate potential changes needed if sandboxed
Dictation support
Integration with Services (control click text selection in any cocoa app for a Services menu)
[P3]
iCloud support (shared settings? document storage?)
Spotlight (Bookmarks and History)
Speech (control click text selection in any cocoa app for a Speech menu)
Airplay (mirror firefox to your tv)
Use system provided geolocation
[Untriaged]
Applescript support
Dragging content to and from Firefox to the OS/other applications within OS X (bug 591713)
Double-tap to zoom (bug 688990)
Look up gesture (bug 687026, depends on bug 301451)
Improve focus ring style for urlbar & search field (bug 689012)
Unfocused Firefox window needs dimmed text in tab titles and address bar (bug 688678)
View menu item stays highlighted after resubmitting POST-form and pressing Cancel (bug 688412)
[10.7] Character repeat on long button presses doesn't work (bug 686113)
[10.7] panels with titlebars not receiving mouse clicks (bug 677545)
[10.7] Hardware acceleration on: The corners at the bottom have no fade out effect / anti-aliasing (bug 675410)
(awaiting QA) [10.7] Firefox 5.0.1 running on Mac OS10.7 returns a Error Code 502 Proxy Error when browsing Web sites (bug 674868)
[10.7] Update Firefox Theme for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (bug 667456)
[10.7] Filepicker directory is not remembered (bug 654842)
Lion Compatibility Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636455
Source: UX team Mac OS integration list
Josh Aas proposed that the project focus on improving our multitouch/gesture support in Firefox. What gestures do you know of that could be improved/are missing?
I think multitouch/gesture support will be a good project is because the students should each be able to work on their own gestures, thus making the project parallelizable. As well the project is also not a binary success/failure (assuming the students are able to improve at least one gesture).
JAWS 
Can i nominate https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=534246 too?
The link to the etherpad is near the bottom of the post. Feel free to update the Untriaged section š
Why not borrow code, contributors and/or ideas from the Camino Browser? It features better OS X integration (Keychain, in particular) than the current Firefox Nightly.
The current pinch to zoom experience on mac is rather terrible. You don’t get direct feedback (in form of a continuous change on the page) to the movement of your fingers, but instead you shrink/zoom the page from one discrete level to another.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
The native (?) reorder toolbar implementation in Camino would be nice to have in Firefox.
One BUG that has been around for years that desperately needs to be addressed ithe following:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476541
Please include in your Mac OS X Integration project.
Thanks for tackling the Firefox OS X integration issue as Firefox doesn’t really feel integrated on that system.
I would add a few elements to the list :
– swipe animation when going back with gesture (bug 678392)
– pinch to zoom (bug 688990) which is really useful for presentations or easy read (for this one I know that Reader mode development is being done)
– missing OS X spell checker (bug 86886, a pretty old one!) which would avoid the need to download dictionaries / duplicate dictionaries (OS X ones + Firefox ones) + better UI
– alternative character dialog (bug 752452)
It would be sweet to have native ML scrollbars (the ones that auto hide). I don’t know if there’s a bug filled for that, I’ll check on Bugzilla.
Yeah, I agree. That bug is on file at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564
I don’t really get why the OS X API can’t be used and that the “reinvent the (square) wheel” paradigm has to be considered, with all inconsistencies it may bring.
I’m just saying that for the sake of curiosity, as I didn’t have a look at the code of Firefox. I’m pretty sure there is no other choice.
Is there any chance for a roadmap or some more public information about the state of Firefox on OSX?
Many bugs date back to the changes introduced in 10.7, 10.9 has already been spotted in browser agents – in other words: It’s about time that Firefox catches up with the competition.
Take a look at bug 232919. It’s about having the (+) button zoom the window to the best width instead of maximizing it completely (just like Safari). There’s already full screen mode for when one wants complete maximization.
I added Bug 803022 to the untriaged list, if that’s ok.
Would you please consider bug 653025 as well? Command-Left and Command-Right don’t work in the Gmail compose window in Firefox. They’re supposed to take the cursor to the end/beginning of the line.