Comment by nfriedly 2 days ago
Firefox is great on Mac too.
You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.
I tried to use Orion as my daily driver on Mac OS (instead of Firefox) but I couldn't get the simplelogin extension to work (it wouldn't authenticate to my account). Also, it was slower than FF (I know, everything says that it is super fast, but that wasn't my experience).
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
I recently discovered that my jetkvm won't work on chrome, firefox or safari in macos, even after trying various workarounds to enable webrtc. The fix was to boot up Fedora in parallels and use Firefox there. In fact I'm thinking about shifting all my browsing to that combination just for further isolation.
Can you still get real Firefox on mac? I thought they forced chromium on there now too? The only time I got MacBook I put linux on it within a few months.
So a couple of things.
1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.
2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.
Yep, you can run Firefox on every Mac released for the past couple of decades. (Maybe more?)
Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").
Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
macOS isn't locked down like iOS. There are things like SIP which prevent some hacking/customising of the system, but:
1. These can all be disabled by advanced users (largely without consequence)
2. They dont prevent things like installing apps or even gaining root access in the first place.
The very fact that you can install Linux is evidence of the different approach taken with macs (you can't easily install Linux of ios devices)
The last macbook I owned had an Ethernet port, so I wasn't sure how much had changed in the interim. I knew that had added some lockdown and I wasn't sure how much. That seems like a reasonable compromise.
Orion browser using Firefox plugins I have found to work quite well on iOS