22 ms·

Use native context menus on Mac OS

587 points by reid 5y ago

fen4o 5y ago
Better late than never
larrysalibra 5y ago
Now if only they’d use the macOS native print dialog like every other app. What ever possessed them to roll their own print dialog?
- juniperplant 5y ago
  I don't know why the trend, but Chrome also uses its own print dialog by default.
  - Avamander 5y ago
    I kinda like Chrome's more than the alternative though.
    - cvak 5y ago
      Chrome's good on Windows, but on macos it's a mess, at least on my machines. No preview generation, weird scaling issues, ...
  - i386 5y ago
    Some product designer in MTV needed something to do
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Probably because the Windows system dialog is horrible ;)
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Yeah, given the number of people who run Firefox on Windows, you absolutely need to have a custom print dialog for them. Maybe it should default to the system one on OS X, but you gotta have that custom one.
- Saint_Genet 5y ago
  Probably some wish to be consistent for all firefoxes across all platforms. It's pretty common for x-platform software, and I think a big mistake. Most people don't move across platforms that often and those that do already encounter so many other differences a print dialog being recognizable won't make much change.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    This. GIMP's save/open file dialog on Windows is, for the lack of a better word, graphics and usability-wise disgusting. Confusing and fiddly controls, no thumbnails (on a graphics application!) If anything, they should replace the GTK open/save dialog with something that mimics the Windows one.
    - ben-schaaf 5y ago
      GTK(3+?) can actually easily use the platform open/save dialog with GtkFileChooserNative.
  - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    I agree completely on how stupid this is. A person is a "Windows user", and prints on lots of applications on Windows, and expects a consistent experience across all applications. Same applies for Linux users and Mac users. A person is not a "Firefox user", who prints of Firefox on Windows/Linux/Mac. The few people who _do_ fit this unique profile, are very much used to seeing very different dialogs on all three platforms. Also, printing in 2021? I get that people still print, but it seems equivalent to improving the Fax dialog in 2006.
    - curt15 5y ago
      In the coronavirus age, reading printed materials causes me less eyestrain than reading on a computer screen.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      The macOS print dialog has a number of pdf options I use frequently.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Turn off print.tab_modal.enabled in about:config.
- michaelt 5y ago
  They want to show a full-sized print preview, which isn't possible on Linux or Windows (I don't know about OS X) A preview is important as web designers seldom pay much attention to print stylesheets; the user probably doesn't want to print five pages of navigation menus, or print a black background with white text.
  - nfoz 5y ago
    Thank you, that explanation makes sense. IMO you should get a preview (with options for changing the rendering), and you can go from that to the system dialog. Instead of combining them.
qalmakka 5y ago
Wow, that issue is older than OS X itself, which I assume it means it originally referred to Classic Mac OS. It's nice to see it tackled after all this time, AFAIK Mozilla doesn't even support XUL anymore.
- athenot 5y ago
  > OS: Mac System 8.5 → MacOS X Indeed, it was first described against MacOS 8.5… that's a memory trip!
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    That's funny that it was reported against Mac OS and fixed in macOS, skipping OS X entirely.
    - quietbritishjim 5y ago
      macOS is just a new marketing term for OS X (albeit a different revision). Whereas classic Mac OS is fundamentally a different OS.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Opened midway through the PowerPC era. Lingered for the entirety of the Intel era. Finally fixed at the dawn of the ARM era.
nyx 5y ago
Leaves me feeling a little contemplative... will the stuff I'm logging in my project's issue tracker still exist in 2040? Will my project be relevant, or even remembered? Is the company we're working for even going to be around?
- slver 5y ago
  How does that matter to you
- nly 5y ago
  There are still issues that come up at my work that nobody wants to tackle because that part of the company is running off fortran. I predict JavaScript will be the Fortran of 2040
  - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
    If I can get the legendary FORTRAN sacks of gold, I’ll happily take Promise.then.then.then.then in 2040
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I think the time to get rich off JavaScript is now - I hear webshops still pay ludicrous salaries, but junior web developers are being manufactured in great quantity, so the market will eventually saturate.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        As all markets, juniors are everywhere and easy to hire but what companies really want are good developers, and those will always be hard to find.
        DonHopkins 5y ago
        All the good COBOL developers had themselves frozen. https://donhopkins.medium.com/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39 https://donhopkins.medium.com/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39
slver 5y ago
"Hey, why not use native context menus?" "I can't argue, but it's a time thing." 21 years later... "Fixed."
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Judging by the massive number of dependency issues (bugs, etc) that appeared in the bug history once they started working on moving to native menus, I guess it really was a time-consuming thing to fix :)
- amelius 5y ago
  If the menu was already implemented in a generic (non-native) way for other OSes, then making a specific native implementation for one OS is more work and thus more time.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Not having the "Look up ..." available from the context menu is my biggest pet-peeve with Firefox on MacOS. I know you can force-click on laptops, but, not everyone is on a laptop all the time, and force-clicking doesn't allow you to choose the selection, which can be quite problematic for languages that doesn't use spaces.
- max1cc 5y ago
  Using Firefox now, making a selection and then force-clicking it opens it in Look Up
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    You are right. That must be pretty new. Thank you for letting me know - this is really useful for me!
    - Aeolos 5y ago
      This was available in my late 2017 macbook pro with force touch. I know because I don't like this feature and was searching for a way to disable it.
      - wodenokoto 5y ago
        Didn’t work on Japanese text for me just a few months ago. 2018 MacBook Pro.
- Yaina 5y ago
  You could file a bug for that! The macOS team at Mozilla is trying to make changes to be a better mac citizen (see native-context menus) :)
  - richardwhiuk 5y ago
    Already open - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391
dijit 5y ago
The common practice now is to "close stale issues", which was discussed recently, though I can't find the thread. It's nice to see the inverse of that, I doubt anyone would have replied every 90 days for 21 years.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Closing issues automatically after a certain period of time is a disastrously stupid thing to do for a bug tracker that helps no one (not users, not reporters, not maintainers), and is actually counterproductive in systems where search excludes closed issues by default (which is most of them), because you’re certain to end up with more duplicates. There are other types of trackers where automatic closure can be justified, but a bug tracker is not one of them. I’ve said it before and will keep on saying it: GitHub’s stale bot should be removed with prejudice.
  - dawnerd 5y ago
    Worse is when they prevent you from reopening or if you comment after it’s closed you get a rude response to open a new ticket.
    - heinrichhartman 5y ago
      I can get behind closing stale issues, to a certain degree, but this practice sound straight-out stupid: Why would you discard the context of a previews discussion?
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        At the risk of spinning of a tangent flamewar: this ties into a wider issue that boggles my mind to this day - the concept of "necroposting" as something negative. People will commonly want to eat you alive if you post a new reply under a stale discussion thread, but that reaction feels really dumb. The old context is useful.
        5y ago
singhkays 5y ago
One of the problems I've found with native context/drop down menus is that when you're sharing a specific window on Zoom, the context menus don't show up on the video. You have to share your entire screen to show someone all the available options in the context/drop-down menu.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  That's because context menus are a separate top-level window with their own event loop on all windowing systems (even macOS, I think). The drop-down you get on a combo-box is a similar deal, at least on Windows and X11.
fuzzy2 5y ago
Meanwhile, on Windows, there’s nothing left of the browser that looks native.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  On Windows, no app looks "native". There seems to be no standard native Windows look left after years of idiotic redesigns and missteps by Microsoft.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    And this is frankly ironic because for so many years one of the biggest complaints against desktop Linux by Windows user was the lack of uniformity between Qt, GTK and other toolkits interfaces.
    - dsego 5y ago
      I doubt that windows users would care, mac users maybe. Number one complaint is lack of pro software like photoshop or ms office.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Windows used to be more consistent. Now the Windows users who cared gave up Windows or gave up caring.
  - mhd 5y ago
    That's always been the case. After Win95 came out, every OS revision and Office release changed the default look and feel. It was most noticeable in the toolbars. Started out with visually raised buttons (like regular interface buttons), then the buttons went flat, then the whole toolbar was raised via a gradient, then everything went bonkers with ribbons (meanwhile in browsers you had huge buttons with text below as yet another alternative). Or the checkmark/cross ok/cancel buttons that were quite common (Borland?). That "old" look and feel co-existing with "modern" flat/web designs just made the differences more noticeable, never mind the often associated differences in icon sizes and styles. Not that other systems are better. Linux always had too many widget toolkits (and now those awful upside-down window-title-toolbars), and even Macs always had at least one weird option (e.g. brushed metal or too iOS-like thingamajigs).
marban 5y ago
About that color management thing... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455077 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455077
modeitsch 5y ago
But I don’t use them any more only brave
jez 5y ago
Just downloaded the beta. I was hoping this meant that right clicking on selected text in Firefox on macOS would let me look up the word in the macOS system dictionary (e.g., in both Safari and Chrome, if you right click on a selected word, the first result in the context menu is `Look up "<word>"`). It's such a convenient way to learn new words (and even works across multiple languages). Alas. Maybe in a future update! (Another, similar, gripe is that both Safari and Chrome, along with most other native macOS apps, will select the word under the cursor with just a right click—no need to even double click to select first and then right click. Firefox doesn't do that.)
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  You can just use the search option in the right-click menu. Google will give you the definition of the word for most words you actually want the definition for.
- hamandcheese 5y ago
  If you use a Force Touch capable trackpad, force touching a word opens the dictionary.
  - adwww 5y ago
    I'm amazed anyone finds that useful. I've had to disable it due to constantly accidentally activating it.
    - hamandcheese 5y ago
      I almost never accidentally force click. You can increase the force required before it activates in settings.
- abdusco 5y ago
  You can force click a word to trigger dictionary lookup. But I'm not sure how to get it working with a selection rather than only the word under the cursor.
pjc50 5y ago
Every now and again I get an email about a bug I commented on sixteen years ago that was opened 21 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 It's kind of nice to see that they will, eventually, get round to issues like this.
- cannam 5y ago
  Comment in December 2000: > Yes, WONTFIX and INVALID seem a bit much. We'll just keep it in the database for eons. That joke aged exceptionally well!
jenshk 5y ago
But but.... There is no data. There is only XUL
megamix 5y ago
Some things are not meant to be fixed hehe. I love old bugs!
abdusco 5y ago
One thing that bugs me is that on macOS access keys[0] are not underlined. This means I can't pick an action with the keyboard and have to use the trackpad. Anyone know how I can enable it / if that's even possible? As a recent Mac user, I don't know if this is a mac thing, but I hate not being able to use the keyboard to navigate around the UI. Although the trackpad is nice, it can't beat the precision of the keyboard. I can't focus the menu bar, trigger a context menu with the keyboard, tab around panels and buttons. It's an accessibility nightmare. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/images/inter-keyboard-image3.png https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/image...
- dom111 5y ago
  I might be misremembering but isn't there a key combo ([Fn] + [Ctrl] + [F7] or something?) that enabled control selection and shows the underlines. I haven't used Mac OS for a while so I might be wrong! Edit: I'm impressed I even remembered that! https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204434#fullkeyboard https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204434#fullkeyboard
  - wffurr 5y ago
    I always flip that setting on Macs. The default just seems wrong to me.
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    Whilst that is the keyboard shortcut for that setting, it doesn't appear to underline access keys.
    - dom111 5y ago
      Ahh, I thought it did both, but that must be misremembering. A quick search indeed confirms there doesn't appear to be a way to do it... Apologies!
- sitharus 5y ago
  There is no Mac equivalent to this Windows feature. You can set up a shortcut to move keyboard focus to the menu bar in Keyboard preferences under Shortcuts (in fact you can remap any application’s keyboard shortcuts there). That’s also where you can enable keyboard navigation between controls.
mhd 5y ago
Ah, "native" and "firefox" really makes me miss Camino, which was a pretty great mix between OS X standard UI features and the FF rendering engine. But apparently keeping that up to speed with Firefox main releases was way too much effort (probably one of the reasons why there are plenty of webkit/chrome shells and almost no Firefox ones).
- classichasclass 5y ago
  The big reason was that Mozilla ended embedding Gecko with Firefox 4/Mozilla 2. This made it nearly impossible to run Gecko in anything but an XUL shell. I understand the reasons cited at the time, largely available resources, but it was very short-sighted and I think it hurt Gecko's mind shares in the long run. I loved Camino as well. A truly excellent browser.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Gecko ending embedding is almost certainly a major reason why everything built with a browser engine is either a Chromium wrapper (not true embedding, but no browser chrome) and WebKit (true embedded). It’s a real shame. Gecko is a nice engine but XUL is a much harder sell.
    - cpmsmith 5y ago
      Servo is the theoretical successor in this regard, like so many other regards, right?
      - iFreilicht 5y ago
        Is the goal of Servo to replace Gecko eventually? I thought it was more of a testbed for new rendering techniques.
        classichasclass 5y ago
        Correct. It's not intended as a Gecko replacement, and several important components in Servo are already part of Gecko. Servo will continue to evolve and new features will originate from it, but it lacks a lot of the legacy and quirks rendering (intentionally) that would be required to make it a full-fledged engine of its own even if Mozilla wanted it to be.
satysin 5y ago
Wow finally! I have to admit while I love Firefox using it on macOS just feels crappy as it is so out of place. I am a huge user of the macOS "Look Up" content menu feature and it being missing in Firefox always frustrates me. As silly as it sounds this might just be enough to get me to use Firefox as my main browser on macOS. I have played around with Nightly recently and love the new UI design. Can't wait for this to hit release.
- kilroy123 5y ago
  It's very sluggish on a Mac. Even on my shiny new M1 is feels sluggish. Safari is way snappier.
  - beckler 5y ago
    I actually experienced the opposite on my M1. Safari locks up all. the. time. but it happens more often when I open a new tab. I run into a ton of compatibility issues, and I hate that you can only install plugins via the App Store. I really wanted to like safari since it’s the most power efficient, and when I got my M1 I went all-in on it, but I went back to Firefox after three months.
- Kwpolska 5y ago
  The trackpad/mouse gestures for Look Up (eg. force pressing the trackpad) work in Firefox.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  Look Up still isn't in the context menu - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391
  - satysin 5y ago
    Indeed I just tried out Nightly and am disappointed it is missing. I have given them a little nudge so hopefully they add Look Up to the context menu before this hits stable.
kome 5y ago
when will be the turn for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643 ? 9 years already. I wish I could donate just to fix this bug for everybody.
was_a_dev 5y ago
A 21 year old bug. At that point the developer creating the fix could have been younger than the open issue itself
- jaza 5y ago
  And the bug can legally drink alcohol (in the silly still-over-21 US).
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    This bug is old enough to run for president: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u729hGPyi6M&ab_channel=SilverstoneAuctions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u729hGPyi6M&ab_channel=Silve...
tobiasu 5y ago
Related: Can anyone share the google search to find instructions how to get started with firefox development? Have they removed it all? I can find old stuff in the archived github repo, but that's about it. What's the official entry point?
- philshem 5y ago
  for developers: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/ https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/ all categories: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ unsure how you can help? https://whatcanidoformozilla.org https://whatcanidoformozilla.org
  - tobiasu 5y ago
    Thank you, it's a shame the first link doesn't show up on google. I've found the contribute page, but that leads straight to https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/tree/main/files/en-us/mozilla/developer_guide/introduction https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/tree/main/files/en-u...
mariusmarais 5y ago
Hope it wasn't P1 for the full 21 years. Edit: Bumped from P3 -> P1 3 months ago :)
beltsazar 5y ago
And it breaks my workflow.. When I read a webpage, I often select some words (technical terms, movie names, etc), right-click, and press "S" in the keyboard for quickly googling the words. I tried it in Firefox Developer Edition (equivalent to Firefox Beta) which already has native context menus, and it didn't work. Can't believe this happens to me: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- thinkbud 5y ago
  I am in the same boat. There is an about:config flag to revert the behavior and use old menus. I am not sure whether the new mac-native context menus even have a notion of access keys, so I am not hopeful for a fix.
xfz 5y ago
I just hope there's no regression. :)
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
The cynic in me thinks this just happened because of a code rewrite they wanted to do anyway for reasons unrelated to this bug report. It’s just a coincidence that the rewrite allowed them to close it. (The initial report mentioned XUL, which if I understand correctly, isn’t even used in Firefox any more.) This is hardly some kind of a commendable instance of listening to your users. I mean, compare it to this bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 First the response was ‘just use an extension’. I did that happily, until the extension API was neutered, making the extension non-functional. When people brought that up, Mozilla closed comments on the bug report. Now it is closed as WONTFIX with this laughable excuse: > Extension APIs (which I know aren't yet available) would be the solution for implementing this if there is enough demand. Meanwhile, Chromium had this from day one. It works a bit differently now, but it’s still there, I just checked. Doable? Perfectly doable.
mtlynch 5y ago
This is a fun comment: >Blake Ross >Comment 5 • 21 years ago >How easy/hard would this be? Blake Ross[0] was 15 years old at the time of that comment. It was two years before he, Dave Hyatt, and Joe Hewitt published the first version of Firefox. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  He even wrote his own fanfic episode of Silicon Valley! https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/the-founder-of-firefox-wrote-his-own-screenplay-for-hbos-silicon-valley-and-its-hilarious/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/the-founder-of-firefox-wro...
- ksec 5y ago
  I think he is at Uber now, not sure if that is still the case.
millerm 5y ago
I’d love to have the “Look up” option on the menu. Every time I right click I am again reminded of its absence. So, hopefully “soon”.
grouphugs 5y ago
why would anyone still use an alt-right product from a fascist corporation that would never respect their privacy? you people are fucking retarded
DonHopkins 5y ago
I have always wanted to implement pie menus as a Firefox or Chrome extension, but I've never been able to find a sufficient API that enables me to pop up a modal dialog window at any place on the screen (specifically: centered on the current mouse cursor position, and in an operating system window that exists outside of the browser tab, overlapping all other windows). Or reshape it to any shape (or simply respect the alpha channel of the document and not show any chrome), so I can make a round or arbitrarily shaped window shrink wrapped to the items. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/windows/#type-CreateType https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/windo... Is there a way with that (or any other) API to pop up and precisely measure and position an arbitrarily shaped (alpha channeled) window, without any other chrome or window frames? And then globally capture and track mouse and keyboard events? Does anyone know if there's now a way for a browser extension to do that in any browser? Or would it require hacking platform specific C++ operating system code? Here's a demo of an ancient implementation of pie menus I made for ActiveX around 1997, that shows pie menus with arbitrarily shaped windows: ActiveX Pie Menus: Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control, developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag ActiveX Pie Menus doc, examples, sources, etc: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieMenus.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieM... https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/PieMenuDescription.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/PieMenuDesc... I did all the drawing with Win32 calls, so you could configure the fonts and colors and sizes and window shapes and styles, but you couldn't style everything arbitrarily with css, embed arbitrary web content, or anything nice like that. At the end of the demo video, I concluded that: >I ran up into a wall of complexity with this ActiveX control, in that I wanted to be able to have as the menu items animated gifs, mpeg movies, fonts with nice attributes, and things like that. >So the first thought was "well let's just put a whole web browser in every item!" >But that was a little heavy-handed. So instead, I put the pie menus into the web browser as a Dynamic HTML Component. Which I'll show next. Of course it makes a lot more sense to draw and style the pie menus with the browser's renderer, but I still want the best of both worlds, where I can pop browser-drawn pie menus in arbitrarily shaped and positioned operating system windows, and track the mouse globally (capturing the mouse and keyboard events and receiving mouse motion and up and key events outside the window, to pop up and track sub-menus properly). JavaScript Pie Menus: Pie menus for JavaScript on Internet Explorer version 5, configured in XML, rendered with dynamic HTML, by Don Hopkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5k4gJK-aWw&ab_channel=DonHopkinsDonHopkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5k4gJK-aWw&ab_channel=DonHo...
jaas 5y ago
As someone who used to be involved in the decision to not implement native context menus, and did a bunch of work on the non-native ones, I want to try to explain why this took a long time. It has nothing to do with engineering resources, and we always wanted native context menus, but they were not customizable enough to meet the perceived needs of web, XUL, and extension developers at the time. People expected to be able to change colors and layout with CSS, for example. The native APIs put heavy limitations on what you could do with a native context menu and it was just not compatible with the expectations of people building against the rendering engine at the time. There was some discussion of switching back and forth between native and non-native menus based on styling, but that got complicated quickly and it wasn't thought to be worthwhile. It sounds like perceived needs have changed, and maybe the native APIs allow for bit more flexibility now. Glad it's happening, excited to see how well it works!
- barrkel 5y ago
  I suspect "perceived needs" have changed due to the scorched earth policy Mozilla took with the old Extensions API. All extensions have had to be pretty much rewritten from scratch.
  - jaas 5y ago
    I'm sure that's a big part of it. The old-style extensions were so powerful because they could put their API tentacles very deep into the rendering engine. Mozilla paid a huge price for allowing that though - it was very difficult to change the behavior of many parts of the rendering engine without breaking extensions. Much of what you'd think was just internal implementation detail was actually API surface accessible to those extensions. The workarounds added a bunch of internal complexity. It really slowed down the pace of development. I get that some people mourn the loss of that style of extension, but dropping it was an important decision that should have happened much earlier. There were other issues with the old-style extensions (e.g. security) but making the pace of development uncompetitive should have been enough to doom it.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. As a user I very much prefer native widgets, as non-native ones always break expectations in subtle and infuriating ways, but it is interesting to see the reasoning behind this type of decision.
thih9 5y ago
Impressive! I like how this makes the browser's UI simpler and more predictable. Also, this is especially useful for people using dark mode, since native context menus match that setting.
sbahr001 5y ago
That is a very long bug, 21 years in the making lol
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

587 points by reid 5y ago

Better late than never

Now if only they’d use the macOS native print dialog like every other app. What ever possessed them to roll their own print dialog?

juniperplant 5y ago
I don't know why the trend, but Chrome also uses its own print dialog by default.
- Avamander 5y ago
  I kinda like Chrome's more than the alternative though.
  - cvak 5y ago
    Chrome's good on Windows, but on macos it's a mess, at least on my machines. No preview generation, weird scaling issues, ...
- i386 5y ago
  Some product designer in MTV needed something to do
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Semaphor 5y ago
Probably because the Windows system dialog is horrible ;)
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Yeah, given the number of people who run Firefox on Windows, you absolutely need to have a custom print dialog for them. Maybe it should default to the system one on OS X, but you gotta have that custom one.
Saint_Genet 5y ago
Probably some wish to be consistent for all firefoxes across all platforms. It's pretty common for x-platform software, and I think a big mistake. Most people don't move across platforms that often and those that do already encounter so many other differences a print dialog being recognizable won't make much change.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  This. GIMP's save/open file dialog on Windows is, for the lack of a better word, graphics and usability-wise disgusting. Confusing and fiddly controls, no thumbnails (on a graphics application!) If anything, they should replace the GTK open/save dialog with something that mimics the Windows one.
  - ben-schaaf 5y ago
    GTK(3+?) can actually easily use the platform open/save dialog with GtkFileChooserNative.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  I agree completely on how stupid this is. A person is a "Windows user", and prints on lots of applications on Windows, and expects a consistent experience across all applications. Same applies for Linux users and Mac users. A person is not a "Firefox user", who prints of Firefox on Windows/Linux/Mac. The few people who _do_ fit this unique profile, are very much used to seeing very different dialogs on all three platforms. Also, printing in 2021? I get that people still print, but it seems equivalent to improving the Fax dialog in 2006.
  - curt15 5y ago
    In the coronavirus age, reading printed materials causes me less eyestrain than reading on a computer screen.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    The macOS print dialog has a number of pdf options I use frequently.
pseudalopex 5y ago
Turn off print.tab_modal.enabled in about:config.
michaelt 5y ago
They want to show a full-sized print preview, which isn't possible on Linux or Windows (I don't know about OS X) A preview is important as web designers seldom pay much attention to print stylesheets; the user probably doesn't want to print five pages of navigation menus, or print a black background with white text.
- nfoz 5y ago
  Thank you, that explanation makes sense. IMO you should get a preview (with options for changing the rendering), and you can go from that to the system dialog. Instead of combining them.

qalmakka 5y ago

Wow, that issue is older than OS X itself, which I assume it means it originally referred to Classic Mac OS. It's nice to see it tackled after all this time, AFAIK Mozilla doesn't even support XUL anymore.

athenot 5y ago
> OS: Mac System 8.5 → MacOS X Indeed, it was first described against MacOS 8.5… that's a memory trip!
- zarzavat 5y ago
  That's funny that it was reported against Mac OS and fixed in macOS, skipping OS X entirely.
  - quietbritishjim 5y ago
    macOS is just a new marketing term for OS X (albeit a different revision). Whereas classic Mac OS is fundamentally a different OS.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Opened midway through the PowerPC era. Lingered for the entirety of the Intel era. Finally fixed at the dawn of the ARM era.

nyx 5y ago

Leaves me feeling a little contemplative... will the stuff I'm logging in my project's issue tracker still exist in 2040? Will my project be relevant, or even remembered? Is the company we're working for even going to be around?

slver 5y ago
How does that matter to you
nly 5y ago
There are still issues that come up at my work that nobody wants to tackle because that part of the company is running off fortran. I predict JavaScript will be the Fortran of 2040
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  If I can get the legendary FORTRAN sacks of gold, I’ll happily take Promise.then.then.then.then in 2040
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I think the time to get rich off JavaScript is now - I hear webshops still pay ludicrous salaries, but junior web developers are being manufactured in great quantity, so the market will eventually saturate.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      As all markets, juniors are everywhere and easy to hire but what companies really want are good developers, and those will always be hard to find.
      - DonHopkins 5y ago
        All the good COBOL developers had themselves frozen. https://donhopkins.medium.com/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39 https://donhopkins.medium.com/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

slver 5y ago

"Hey, why not use native context menus?" "I can't argue, but it's a time thing." 21 years later... "Fixed."

kevingadd 5y ago
Judging by the massive number of dependency issues (bugs, etc) that appeared in the bug history once they started working on moving to native menus, I guess it really was a time-consuming thing to fix :)
amelius 5y ago
If the menu was already implemented in a generic (non-native) way for other OSes, then making a specific native implementation for one OS is more work and thus more time.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Not having the "Look up ..." available from the context menu is my biggest pet-peeve with Firefox on MacOS. I know you can force-click on laptops, but, not everyone is on a laptop all the time, and force-clicking doesn't allow you to choose the selection, which can be quite problematic for languages that doesn't use spaces.

max1cc 5y ago
Using Firefox now, making a selection and then force-clicking it opens it in Look Up
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  You are right. That must be pretty new. Thank you for letting me know - this is really useful for me!
  - Aeolos 5y ago
    This was available in my late 2017 macbook pro with force touch. I know because I don't like this feature and was searching for a way to disable it.
    - wodenokoto 5y ago
      Didn’t work on Japanese text for me just a few months ago. 2018 MacBook Pro.
Yaina 5y ago
You could file a bug for that! The macOS team at Mozilla is trying to make changes to be a better mac citizen (see native-context menus) :)
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  Already open - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391

dijit 5y ago

The common practice now is to "close stale issues", which was discussed recently, though I can't find the thread. It's nice to see the inverse of that, I doubt anyone would have replied every 90 days for 21 years.

chrismorgan 5y ago
Closing issues automatically after a certain period of time is a disastrously stupid thing to do for a bug tracker that helps no one (not users, not reporters, not maintainers), and is actually counterproductive in systems where search excludes closed issues by default (which is most of them), because you’re certain to end up with more duplicates. There are other types of trackers where automatic closure can be justified, but a bug tracker is not one of them. I’ve said it before and will keep on saying it: GitHub’s stale bot should be removed with prejudice.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  Worse is when they prevent you from reopening or if you comment after it’s closed you get a rude response to open a new ticket.
  - heinrichhartman 5y ago
    I can get behind closing stale issues, to a certain degree, but this practice sound straight-out stupid: Why would you discard the context of a previews discussion?
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      At the risk of spinning of a tangent flamewar: this ties into a wider issue that boggles my mind to this day - the concept of "necroposting" as something negative. People will commonly want to eat you alive if you post a new reply under a stale discussion thread, but that reaction feels really dumb. The old context is useful.
      - 5y ago

singhkays 5y ago

One of the problems I've found with native context/drop down menus is that when you're sharing a specific window on Zoom, the context menus don't show up on the video. You have to share your entire screen to show someone all the available options in the context/drop-down menu.

formerly_proven 5y ago
That's because context menus are a separate top-level window with their own event loop on all windowing systems (even macOS, I think). The drop-down you get on a combo-box is a similar deal, at least on Windows and X11.

fuzzy2 5y ago

Meanwhile, on Windows, there’s nothing left of the browser that looks native.

perryizgr8 5y ago
On Windows, no app looks "native". There seems to be no standard native Windows look left after years of idiotic redesigns and missteps by Microsoft.
- darkwater 5y ago
  And this is frankly ironic because for so many years one of the biggest complaints against desktop Linux by Windows user was the lack of uniformity between Qt, GTK and other toolkits interfaces.
  - dsego 5y ago
    I doubt that windows users would care, mac users maybe. Number one complaint is lack of pro software like photoshop or ms office.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Windows used to be more consistent. Now the Windows users who cared gave up Windows or gave up caring.
- mhd 5y ago
  That's always been the case. After Win95 came out, every OS revision and Office release changed the default look and feel. It was most noticeable in the toolbars. Started out with visually raised buttons (like regular interface buttons), then the buttons went flat, then the whole toolbar was raised via a gradient, then everything went bonkers with ribbons (meanwhile in browsers you had huge buttons with text below as yet another alternative). Or the checkmark/cross ok/cancel buttons that were quite common (Borland?). That "old" look and feel co-existing with "modern" flat/web designs just made the differences more noticeable, never mind the often associated differences in icon sizes and styles. Not that other systems are better. Linux always had too many widget toolkits (and now those awful upside-down window-title-toolbars), and even Macs always had at least one weird option (e.g. brushed metal or too iOS-like thingamajigs).

marban 5y ago

About that color management thing... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455077 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455077

modeitsch 5y ago

But I don’t use them any more only brave

jez 5y ago

Just downloaded the beta. I was hoping this meant that right clicking on selected text in Firefox on macOS would let me look up the word in the macOS system dictionary (e.g., in both Safari and Chrome, if you right click on a selected word, the first result in the context menu is `Look up "<word>"`). It's such a convenient way to learn new words (and even works across multiple languages). Alas. Maybe in a future update! (Another, similar, gripe is that both Safari and Chrome, along with most other native macOS apps, will select the word under the cursor with just a right click—no need to even double click to select first and then right click. Firefox doesn't do that.)

perryizgr8 5y ago
You can just use the search option in the right-click menu. Google will give you the definition of the word for most words you actually want the definition for.
hamandcheese 5y ago
If you use a Force Touch capable trackpad, force touching a word opens the dictionary.
- adwww 5y ago
  I'm amazed anyone finds that useful. I've had to disable it due to constantly accidentally activating it.
  - hamandcheese 5y ago
    I almost never accidentally force click. You can increase the force required before it activates in settings.
abdusco 5y ago
You can force click a word to trigger dictionary lookup. But I'm not sure how to get it working with a selection rather than only the word under the cursor.

pjc50 5y ago

Every now and again I get an email about a bug I commented on sixteen years ago that was opened 21 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342 It's kind of nice to see that they will, eventually, get round to issues like this.

cannam 5y ago
Comment in December 2000: > Yes, WONTFIX and INVALID seem a bit much. We'll just keep it in the database for eons. That joke aged exceptionally well!

jenshk 5y ago

But but.... There is no data. There is only XUL

megamix 5y ago

Some things are not meant to be fixed hehe. I love old bugs!

abdusco 5y ago

One thing that bugs me is that on macOS access keys[0] are not underlined. This means I can't pick an action with the keyboard and have to use the trackpad. Anyone know how I can enable it / if that's even possible? As a recent Mac user, I don't know if this is a mac thing, but I hate not being able to use the keyboard to navigate around the UI. Although the trackpad is nice, it can't beat the precision of the keyboard. I can't focus the menu bar, trigger a context menu with the keyboard, tab around panels and buttons. It's an accessibility nightmare. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/images/inter-keyboard-image3.png https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/image...

dom111 5y ago
I might be misremembering but isn't there a key combo ([Fn] + [Ctrl] + [F7] or something?) that enabled control selection and shows the underlines. I haven't used Mac OS for a while so I might be wrong! Edit: I'm impressed I even remembered that! https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204434#fullkeyboard https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204434#fullkeyboard
- wffurr 5y ago
  I always flip that setting on Macs. The default just seems wrong to me.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  Whilst that is the keyboard shortcut for that setting, it doesn't appear to underline access keys.
  - dom111 5y ago
    Ahh, I thought it did both, but that must be misremembering. A quick search indeed confirms there doesn't appear to be a way to do it... Apologies!
sitharus 5y ago
There is no Mac equivalent to this Windows feature. You can set up a shortcut to move keyboard focus to the menu bar in Keyboard preferences under Shortcuts (in fact you can remap any application’s keyboard shortcuts there). That’s also where you can enable keyboard navigation between controls.

mhd 5y ago

Ah, "native" and "firefox" really makes me miss Camino, which was a pretty great mix between OS X standard UI features and the FF rendering engine. But apparently keeping that up to speed with Firefox main releases was way too much effort (probably one of the reasons why there are plenty of webkit/chrome shells and almost no Firefox ones).

classichasclass 5y ago
The big reason was that Mozilla ended embedding Gecko with Firefox 4/Mozilla 2. This made it nearly impossible to run Gecko in anything but an XUL shell. I understand the reasons cited at the time, largely available resources, but it was very short-sighted and I think it hurt Gecko's mind shares in the long run. I loved Camino as well. A truly excellent browser.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Gecko ending embedding is almost certainly a major reason why everything built with a browser engine is either a Chromium wrapper (not true embedding, but no browser chrome) and WebKit (true embedded). It’s a real shame. Gecko is a nice engine but XUL is a much harder sell.
  - cpmsmith 5y ago
    Servo is the theoretical successor in this regard, like so many other regards, right?
    - iFreilicht 5y ago
      Is the goal of Servo to replace Gecko eventually? I thought it was more of a testbed for new rendering techniques.
      - classichasclass 5y ago
        Correct. It's not intended as a Gecko replacement, and several important components in Servo are already part of Gecko. Servo will continue to evolve and new features will originate from it, but it lacks a lot of the legacy and quirks rendering (intentionally) that would be required to make it a full-fledged engine of its own even if Mozilla wanted it to be.

satysin 5y ago

Wow finally! I have to admit while I love Firefox using it on macOS just feels crappy as it is so out of place. I am a huge user of the macOS "Look Up" content menu feature and it being missing in Firefox always frustrates me. As silly as it sounds this might just be enough to get me to use Firefox as my main browser on macOS. I have played around with Nightly recently and love the new UI design. Can't wait for this to hit release.

kilroy123 5y ago
It's very sluggish on a Mac. Even on my shiny new M1 is feels sluggish. Safari is way snappier.
- beckler 5y ago
  I actually experienced the opposite on my M1. Safari locks up all. the. time. but it happens more often when I open a new tab. I run into a ton of compatibility issues, and I hate that you can only install plugins via the App Store. I really wanted to like safari since it’s the most power efficient, and when I got my M1 I went all-in on it, but I went back to Firefox after three months.
Kwpolska 5y ago
The trackpad/mouse gestures for Look Up (eg. force pressing the trackpad) work in Firefox.
richardwhiuk 5y ago
Look Up still isn't in the context menu - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116391
- satysin 5y ago
  Indeed I just tried out Nightly and am disappointed it is missing. I have given them a little nudge so hopefully they add Look Up to the context menu before this hits stable.

kome 5y ago

when will be the turn for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643 ? 9 years already. I wish I could donate just to fix this bug for everybody.

was_a_dev 5y ago

A 21 year old bug. At that point the developer creating the fix could have been younger than the open issue itself

jaza 5y ago
And the bug can legally drink alcohol (in the silly still-over-21 US).
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  This bug is old enough to run for president: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u729hGPyi6M&ab_channel=SilverstoneAuctions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u729hGPyi6M&ab_channel=Silve...

tobiasu 5y ago

Related: Can anyone share the google search to find instructions how to get started with firefox development? Have they removed it all? I can find old stuff in the archived github repo, but that's about it. What's the official entry point?

philshem 5y ago
for developers: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/ https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/ all categories: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ unsure how you can help? https://whatcanidoformozilla.org https://whatcanidoformozilla.org
- tobiasu 5y ago
  Thank you, it's a shame the first link doesn't show up on google. I've found the contribute page, but that leads straight to https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/tree/main/files/en-us/mozilla/developer_guide/introduction https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/tree/main/files/en-u...

mariusmarais 5y ago

Hope it wasn't P1 for the full 21 years. Edit: Bumped from P3 -> P1 3 months ago :)

beltsazar 5y ago

And it breaks my workflow.. When I read a webpage, I often select some words (technical terms, movie names, etc), right-click, and press "S" in the keyboard for quickly googling the words. I tried it in Firefox Developer Edition (equivalent to Firefox Beta) which already has native context menus, and it didn't work. Can't believe this happens to me: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

thinkbud 5y ago
I am in the same boat. There is an about:config flag to revert the behavior and use old menus. I am not sure whether the new mac-native context menus even have a notion of access keys, so I am not hopeful for a fix.

xfz 5y ago

I just hope there's no regression. :)

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

The cynic in me thinks this just happened because of a code rewrite they wanted to do anyway for reasons unrelated to this bug report. It’s just a coincidence that the rewrite allowed them to close it. (The initial report mentioned XUL, which if I understand correctly, isn’t even used in Firefox any more.) This is hardly some kind of a commendable instance of listening to your users. I mean, compare it to this bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 First the response was ‘just use an extension’. I did that happily, until the extension API was neutered, making the extension non-functional. When people brought that up, Mozilla closed comments on the bug report. Now it is closed as WONTFIX with this laughable excuse: > Extension APIs (which I know aren't yet available) would be the solution for implementing this if there is enough demand. Meanwhile, Chromium had this from day one. It works a bit differently now, but it’s still there, I just checked. Doable? Perfectly doable.

mtlynch 5y ago

This is a fun comment: >Blake Ross >Comment 5 • 21 years ago >How easy/hard would this be? Blake Ross[0] was 15 years old at the time of that comment. It was two years before he, Dave Hyatt, and Joe Hewitt published the first version of Firefox. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross

DonHopkins 5y ago
He even wrote his own fanfic episode of Silicon Valley! https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/the-founder-of-firefox-wrote-his-own-screenplay-for-hbos-silicon-valley-and-its-hilarious/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/the-founder-of-firefox-wro...
ksec 5y ago
I think he is at Uber now, not sure if that is still the case.

millerm 5y ago

I’d love to have the “Look up” option on the menu. Every time I right click I am again reminded of its absence. So, hopefully “soon”.

grouphugs 5y ago

why would anyone still use an alt-right product from a fascist corporation that would never respect their privacy? you people are fucking retarded

DonHopkins 5y ago

I have always wanted to implement pie menus as a Firefox or Chrome extension, but I've never been able to find a sufficient API that enables me to pop up a modal dialog window at any place on the screen (specifically: centered on the current mouse cursor position, and in an operating system window that exists outside of the browser tab, overlapping all other windows). Or reshape it to any shape (or simply respect the alpha channel of the document and not show any chrome), so I can make a round or arbitrarily shaped window shrink wrapped to the items. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/windows/#type-CreateType https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/windo... Is there a way with that (or any other) API to pop up and precisely measure and position an arbitrarily shaped (alpha channeled) window, without any other chrome or window frames? And then globally capture and track mouse and keyboard events? Does anyone know if there's now a way for a browser extension to do that in any browser? Or would it require hacking platform specific C++ operating system code? Here's a demo of an ancient implementation of pie menus I made for ActiveX around 1997, that shows pie menus with arbitrarily shaped windows: ActiveX Pie Menus: Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control, developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag ActiveX Pie Menus doc, examples, sources, etc: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieMenus.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieM... https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/PieMenuDescription.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/PieMenuDesc... I did all the drawing with Win32 calls, so you could configure the fonts and colors and sizes and window shapes and styles, but you couldn't style everything arbitrarily with css, embed arbitrary web content, or anything nice like that. At the end of the demo video, I concluded that: >I ran up into a wall of complexity with this ActiveX control, in that I wanted to be able to have as the menu items animated gifs, mpeg movies, fonts with nice attributes, and things like that. >So the first thought was "well let's just put a whole web browser in every item!" >But that was a little heavy-handed. So instead, I put the pie menus into the web browser as a Dynamic HTML Component. Which I'll show next. Of course it makes a lot more sense to draw and style the pie menus with the browser's renderer, but I still want the best of both worlds, where I can pop browser-drawn pie menus in arbitrarily shaped and positioned operating system windows, and track the mouse globally (capturing the mouse and keyboard events and receiving mouse motion and up and key events outside the window, to pop up and track sub-menus properly). JavaScript Pie Menus: Pie menus for JavaScript on Internet Explorer version 5, configured in XML, rendered with dynamic HTML, by Don Hopkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5k4gJK-aWw&ab_channel=DonHopkinsDonHopkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5k4gJK-aWw&ab_channel=DonHo...

jaas 5y ago

As someone who used to be involved in the decision to not implement native context menus, and did a bunch of work on the non-native ones, I want to try to explain why this took a long time. It has nothing to do with engineering resources, and we always wanted native context menus, but they were not customizable enough to meet the perceived needs of web, XUL, and extension developers at the time. People expected to be able to change colors and layout with CSS, for example. The native APIs put heavy limitations on what you could do with a native context menu and it was just not compatible with the expectations of people building against the rendering engine at the time. There was some discussion of switching back and forth between native and non-native menus based on styling, but that got complicated quickly and it wasn't thought to be worthwhile. It sounds like perceived needs have changed, and maybe the native APIs allow for bit more flexibility now. Glad it's happening, excited to see how well it works!

barrkel 5y ago
I suspect "perceived needs" have changed due to the scorched earth policy Mozilla took with the old Extensions API. All extensions have had to be pretty much rewritten from scratch.
- jaas 5y ago
  I'm sure that's a big part of it. The old-style extensions were so powerful because they could put their API tentacles very deep into the rendering engine. Mozilla paid a huge price for allowing that though - it was very difficult to change the behavior of many parts of the rendering engine without breaking extensions. Much of what you'd think was just internal implementation detail was actually API surface accessible to those extensions. The workarounds added a bunch of internal complexity. It really slowed down the pace of development. I get that some people mourn the loss of that style of extension, but dropping it was an important decision that should have happened much earlier. There were other issues with the old-style extensions (e.g. security) but making the pace of development uncompetitive should have been enough to doom it.
kergonath 5y ago
Thanks for the explanation. As a user I very much prefer native widgets, as non-native ones always break expectations in subtle and infuriating ways, but it is interesting to see the reasoning behind this type of decision.

thih9 5y ago

Impressive! I like how this makes the browser's UI simpler and more predictable. Also, this is especially useful for people using dark mode, since native context menus match that setting.

sbahr001 5y ago

That is a very long bug, 21 years in the making lol

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