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First time in a while running Firefox on Mac, and I'm happy to report it finally supports bounce scrolling! In general scrolling is very smooth and performance

by dilap 4y ago

First time in a while running Firefox on Mac, and I'm happy to report it finally supports bounce scrolling! In general scrolling is very smooth and performance seems excellent.

jbverschoor 4y ago
Nope, not here. No bouncing, maybe due to 'no animation settings' in display. Also, scrolling feels different. Different speed, different acceleration. Still doesn't feel native at all.
- dilap 4y ago
  > Nope, not here. No bouncing, maybe due to 'no animation settings' in display Where's that setting? > Different speed, different acceleration. Huh, interesting! Are you mouse or trackpad? I'm comparing side-by-side on trackpad and I can't detect any difference. If I flick the trackpad at the same speed they will both land roughly in the same place on the page, and the variation, as near as I can tell, is because of variations in my flick speed. In both Safari and Firefox I find it basically effortless to scroll exactly where I want to. (This was emphatically not true for me in previous versions of Firefox.) Feels totally natural. Though maybe there is a difference I'm just not sensitive enough to detect! FWIW, I'm on Firefox 104.0.2, macOS 12.5.1, MB Pro / M1 Max. (Spark, which is a supposedly-native email app, somehow has weirder feeling scrolling to me than Firefox.)
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Reduce Motion in display or accessibility settings I think it’s called. I’m on M1. Just updated FF from the menu. I’m using the trackpad, but again, I changed my system settings, as I don’t like the default speed and acceleration.
    - dilap 4y ago
      Huh, yeah, turning on "Reduce motion" does indeed disable bounce scroll in Firefox. Definitely a strange choice on their part! (It doesn't affect it in other apps.) > I changed my system settings, as I don’t like the default speed and acceleration I see, that could make sense, if Safari was honoring those changes and Firefox wasn't, in some way. I've got mostly stock settings (slightly bumped up speed and three-finger drag) and it feels spot-on.
      - jbverschoor 4y ago
        It's not a choice.. It's just people trying re-implement "native" behavior. Doesn't work. Just use native components. Firefox never felt native. Typography is different from my system settings, window color is different, mouse behavior different, scrolling behavior is different, spacebar to scroll jumps, zoom is weird.. actual size is 125%. So I always have to zoom out a few times to get to 100%, and it doesn't remember those settings. The only reason I use firefox sometimes is because I can use different profiles as tabs in the same window. For those pesky apps without multi-account / account-member-user schema. I used to love firefox 15+ years ago.. when I was still on windows, and IE was really bad, but switched to chrome the moment it came out.
        dilap 4y ago
        It's gotta be a choice, right?, since they're enabling or disabling the bounce scroll based on the pref. If it was just system-agnostic the pref wouldn't make a difference. My understanding is all of the browsers contain a lot of custom widgets. Like, Safari is not drawing text using NSTextView or whatever. Looking at Firefox and Safari side-by-side they look pretttty similar to me. Some very slight text rendering differences, and Firefox is maybe a touch less smooth to scroll than Safari. The bounce-scroll is a little bit more stiff. I recorded a video if you want to see what I'm seeing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkAy0O5EDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkAy0O5EDs There are so many different widget implementations out there now, maybe I'm just losing my sense of what "native" is. But the scroll physics feel right to me, the text looks right, the text selection and input and shortcuts all work...native enough for me!
      - 4y ago
- aeharding 4y ago
  Something must be wrong on your machine. On my Mac Mini and Air (m1) Firefox scrolling is extremely smooth and feels much more native than Chrome. Overscrolling has worked great since they revamped the engine, even in nested scroll views! Firefox's scrolling engine is so good, CSS scroll snapping feel more native than Safari's implementation (with chrome feeling the least native - too little friction and takes too long to stop moving on large scroll snap areas) [1]. [1] https://ppg.report/41.876,-87.624 https://ppg.report/41.876,-87.624 for example of CSS scroll snapping that performs best on Firefox on Mac

by dilap 4y ago

First time in a while running Firefox on Mac, and I'm happy to report it finally supports bounce scrolling! In general scrolling is very smooth and performance seems excellent.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Nope, not here. No bouncing, maybe due to 'no animation settings' in display. Also, scrolling feels different. Different speed, different acceleration. Still doesn't feel native at all.

dilap 4y ago
> Nope, not here. No bouncing, maybe due to 'no animation settings' in display Where's that setting? > Different speed, different acceleration. Huh, interesting! Are you mouse or trackpad? I'm comparing side-by-side on trackpad and I can't detect any difference. If I flick the trackpad at the same speed they will both land roughly in the same place on the page, and the variation, as near as I can tell, is because of variations in my flick speed. In both Safari and Firefox I find it basically effortless to scroll exactly where I want to. (This was emphatically not true for me in previous versions of Firefox.) Feels totally natural. Though maybe there is a difference I'm just not sensitive enough to detect! FWIW, I'm on Firefox 104.0.2, macOS 12.5.1, MB Pro / M1 Max. (Spark, which is a supposedly-native email app, somehow has weirder feeling scrolling to me than Firefox.)
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Reduce Motion in display or accessibility settings I think it’s called. I’m on M1. Just updated FF from the menu. I’m using the trackpad, but again, I changed my system settings, as I don’t like the default speed and acceleration.
  - dilap 4y ago
    Huh, yeah, turning on "Reduce motion" does indeed disable bounce scroll in Firefox. Definitely a strange choice on their part! (It doesn't affect it in other apps.) > I changed my system settings, as I don’t like the default speed and acceleration I see, that could make sense, if Safari was honoring those changes and Firefox wasn't, in some way. I've got mostly stock settings (slightly bumped up speed and three-finger drag) and it feels spot-on.
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
      It's not a choice.. It's just people trying re-implement "native" behavior. Doesn't work. Just use native components. Firefox never felt native. Typography is different from my system settings, window color is different, mouse behavior different, scrolling behavior is different, spacebar to scroll jumps, zoom is weird.. actual size is 125%. So I always have to zoom out a few times to get to 100%, and it doesn't remember those settings. The only reason I use firefox sometimes is because I can use different profiles as tabs in the same window. For those pesky apps without multi-account / account-member-user schema. I used to love firefox 15+ years ago.. when I was still on windows, and IE was really bad, but switched to chrome the moment it came out.
      - dilap 4y ago
        It's gotta be a choice, right?, since they're enabling or disabling the bounce scroll based on the pref. If it was just system-agnostic the pref wouldn't make a difference. My understanding is all of the browsers contain a lot of custom widgets. Like, Safari is not drawing text using NSTextView or whatever. Looking at Firefox and Safari side-by-side they look pretttty similar to me. Some very slight text rendering differences, and Firefox is maybe a touch less smooth to scroll than Safari. The bounce-scroll is a little bit more stiff. I recorded a video if you want to see what I'm seeing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkAy0O5EDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkAy0O5EDs There are so many different widget implementations out there now, maybe I'm just losing my sense of what "native" is. But the scroll physics feel right to me, the text looks right, the text selection and input and shortcuts all work...native enough for me!
    - 4y ago
aeharding 4y ago
Something must be wrong on your machine. On my Mac Mini and Air (m1) Firefox scrolling is extremely smooth and feels much more native than Chrome. Overscrolling has worked great since they revamped the engine, even in nested scroll views! Firefox's scrolling engine is so good, CSS scroll snapping feel more native than Safari's implementation (with chrome feeling the least native - too little friction and takes too long to stop moving on large scroll snap areas) [1]. [1] https://ppg.report/41.876,-87.624 https://ppg.report/41.876,-87.624 for example of CSS scroll snapping that performs best on Firefox on Mac