Firefox and the 4-Year Battle To Have Google To Treat It as a First-Class Citizen (zdnet.com)

Web monoculture is well and truly alive when Google cannot be bothered to make a full-featured cross-browser mobile search page. From a report: It has been over five years since Firefox really turned a corner and started to morph from its bloated memory-munching ways into the lightning-quick browser it is today. Buried in Mozilla's issue tracker is a bug that kicked off in February 2014, and is yet to be resolved: Have Google treat Firefox for Android as a first-class citizen and serve up comparable content to what the search giant hands Chrome and Safari. After years of requests, meetings, and to and fro, it has hit a point where the developers of Firefox are experimenting by manipulating the user agent string in its nightly development builds to trick Google into thinking that Firefox Mobile is a Chrome browser. Not only does Google's search page degrade for Firefox on Android, but some new properties like Google Flights have occasionally taken to outright blocking of the browser.

Comments

Re:Reigniting the browser wars

[AmiMoJo]

For stuff like Google Flights they are probably worried that untested browsers might violate some rule in a heavily regulated market because something doesn't display properly. In the EU there are rules about stuff like displaying prices that are not actually available or that don't include all the taxes and fees, for example.

They should still fix it, but it's probably not a conspiracy against Firefox.