Comments on: Firefox 3 for Mac OS X: Under the Hood

By: Gord

Gord — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:07:31 +0000

I am loving firefox 3. much better than 2 on a mac thats for sure. Thanks for the post and the blog, it is a much apreciated resource.

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:51:53 +0000

We’re starting to notice on the Mac OS that Firefox 3.x is not properly handling applet window updates. Our applet is sending the display.repaint() call; the OS is not returning applet.update().

Jmol to OS: display.repaint(); // tell the OS to upate the page
OS to Jmol: update(); // tell Jmol to construct a new screen buffer and display it in the window.

Our crude test at http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/docs/examples-11/testmac.htm repeats endlessly until this quirk appears. The OS just doesn’t return Jmol’s call. No other problem with other operating systems that we know of.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:13:06 +0000

“Apple evolves very quickly. Mac OS X 10.3 does not do many of the things we need it to do and we don’t have the resources to offer support that far back.”

Well maybe WE ALL don’t have the resources to buy a million goddamn new computers. You’re forcing us to turn perfectly good 4-5 year old systems into toxic e-waste, coz a newer OS won’t run decently on it.

“don’t have the resources” – then what was the 55 million dollars Mozilla got from Google Adwords? Couldn’t you, like *pay* someone to do the dreary scut work volunteers can’t be bothered to do? That’s what most volunteer organizations do…

I mean, honestly. Who are you writing Firefox for? Regular folks, or you “replace your computer every year” digirati? Grrr…. I thought the whole POINT of the Mozilla foundation was internet democracy and access to all. Yes it’s true you look at your access logs and don’t see a lot of older OS’s… but this is self-fulfilling.

What, “use firefox 2 then”? Two problems. #1, security is no longer being maintained, so that’s the road to getting hacked. #2, modern Web application writers think the same way you do, and demand/require more modern browsers.

So who is in the best position to help with gap between web applications and consumer hardware/OS? Ding. The browser folks.

By: disgruntled

disgruntled — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:23:39 +0000

FF3 for mac freezes and crashes after a couple hours of use. Especially on facebook and myspace. FF2 did this too. So dissapointed. Please fix. Plus it’s a resource hog. Losing faith.

By: EdmonCU

EdmonCU — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:13:24 +0000

I have consistently noticed on all editions of Firefox (w/o any 3rd party-installed add-ons) on all my machines (G4 / dualG4 / dualG5 / Intel Core2Duo Mac) is behaving the same way… (even on a Freshly installed OSX — used Tiger and Leopard and from v2 until the latest v3 Firefox)

- Flash animations and actions are slow and choppy.
- Java script (IRC) tend to have display problems. Images disappearing w/in the Java applet.

What’s odd is that in Safari, none of these behaviors show.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:55:19 +0000

I’m using identical builds of the latest download of FF 3.0.5. on an Intel Mac on 10.5.6, and on an old white iBook G3 on 10.4.11.
- Why won’t it load images from Wikipedia on the IntelMac? I am now forced to go back to using safari.

By: SwineFactory

SwineFactory — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:01:58 +0000

Sorry – edit to the above. The somewhat confusing sentence about designers and parallels should have read:

“A number of the designers that I’ve worked with load parallels on their machines specifically so that they can… etc.”

My non-linear comment writing is catching up with me again, and annihilating what little coherence I manage to hang onto through all of the whiskey

By: SwineFactory

SwineFactory — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 06:54:50 +0000

Fullscreen support for FF3 on OS X *should* be a priority – us designer types (you know, the ones who own macs? Ostensibly the people you’re developing FF3 on OS X for…) eat up fullscreen mode for the presentation enhancements that if gives when previewing work. A number of the designers that I’ve worked with load parallels on the machines of their art directors specifically so that they can demo live web work using fullscreen mode.

Bringing it in would be a boon, and remove the whole pesky virtualization thing (for what I would consider to be a defining feature that’s conspicuously absent on a major platform).

I’m sure there’s a good reason that it’s missing, but certainly, it’s not an insurmountable challenge to include it, is it?

I, and many others, would love you long time (and further aim to promote the dominance of FF).

By: Sasha

Sasha — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:28:04 +0000

Hi, people,
I ran into a problem: Firefox 3 for Mac diplays a drop content bug on our site: http://www.nti.org
It is similar to the 3 px drop bug in IE6 for which I had to use a proprietary hack.
The problem only shows in the Firefox 3 for Mac version. Firefox for Windows is fine. I would appreciate any of your insight into how I can combat this in Firefox 3 for Mac. Is there any kind of proprietary code I can use? thanks.
Sasha
nikitin@nti.org

By: space man

space man — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:12:45 +0000

Talking about Firefox and Safari, I think they both are kinda equal…And its true that now it seems impossible to produce 64-bit builds of Firefox for Mac OS X. We in Russia trying to make something out of this:)By the way, I dont have problem with Firefox scrolling,goes pretty smooth:)