ArcOS on Firefox

I'm aware that people have strong opinions about Firefox. Some people won't use anything else, others despise it. That said, there are objective reasons not to use Firefox for the ArcOS project, either in using or developing. Here's problems with Firefox that I've collected.

This page might come across as a rant, and in some ways it is, but it's just quite simply the truth. Firefox isn't a browser I'm willing to 100% support simply because of the laundry list of problems.

Performance

In my testing, CPU and RAM usage spike dramatically for no apparent reason, even when running the Firefox New Tab page. The FPS of ArcOS drops significantly in some scenarios, even with just the boot screen displayed. You might say that I don't optimize ArcOS enough, but I do, so Firefox has no excuse.

Error messages

In Chrome, errors are clearly displayed with the actual error and a usable stack trace. Firefox isn't so lucky. You get a random list of calls made before the exception occured, you aren't even told why the exception occured. This is especially frustrating if you're developing an app, an error occurs, and you can't effectively trace back why it crashed because the actual error isn't displayed.

Unpredictable glass effects and shell coloring

Because of the unpredictable nature of Firefox' CSS engine, it's hard to make the shell coloring and blurring work accurately and reliably across the operating system. This has mostly been resolved by now, but it's annoying nonetheless.