One criticism of Mozilla Firefox for Mac has been that flash videos played through the browser can temporarily consume 100% of your CPU causing your Mac to momentarily freeze. The tab system and Awesome Bar have been streamlined to launch/get results very quickly too. Reloading the page restarts any affected plugins. Crash protection ensures only the plugin causing the issue stops working, not the rest of the content being browsed. Mozilla Firefox manages complex video and web content using layer-based Direct2D and Driect3D graphics systems. Start up speed and graphics rendering are also among the quickest in the market. Mozilla Firefox boasts impressive page load speeds thanks to the excellent JagerMonkey JavaScript engine. Next to that you have the download history and home buttons.

Outside of that a view button controls what you see below the URL. To the right of the URL box is a search box which allows you to customize your search engine options. On the right side of the URL box there are bookmarking, history and refresh buttons. The URL box features direct Google searching as well as an auto predict/history feature called Awesome Bar. In recent years Mozilla has also focused on maximizing browsing area by simplifying toolbar controls to just a Mozilla Firefox button (which contains settings and options) and back/forward buttons. They created the tab structure that has been adopted by most other browsers. Mozilla put of a lot of resources into creating a simple but effective UI aimed at making browsing quicker and easier.

The browser is particularly popular with developers thanks to its open source development and active community of advanced users. The key features that have made Mozilla Firefox so popular are the simple and effective UI, browser speed and strong security capabilities. Although the browser's market share is lower for OS X, it is still one of the most popular browsers available on the Mac platform. Since then, Mozilla Firefox has consistently featured in the top 3 most popular browsers globally.

At its public launch in 2004 Mozilla Firefox was the first browser to challenge Microsoft Internet Explorer’s dominance. Mozilla Firefox is a fast, light and tidy open source web browser.

Firefox 45.0 release notes