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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.
Sounds like a good case for an anti-trust suit.
It was bad 10 years ago, when pages were “best viewed in Internet Explorer”. The fact that nowadays it’s Google Chrome rather than IE doesn’t make it any less bad.
Code your web pages using web standards, guys. Then, if things are broken in a particular browser - submit a bug report.
#DeleteChrome
Because if you knew what you're talking about, you'd know that the progressive era anti-trust campaigns were started by REPUBLICAN Teddy Roosevelt.
#fail
Back to history class for you!
I realise it is a troll, but it is always worth reminding people that capitalism requires a well regulated market. Whatever you may think of it, if people contributing to the market are allowed to lie, cheat, steal or otherwise manipulate the rules of the game what you have is not capitalism. To what extent that already happens is left as an exercise to the reader. Google has been allowed to become a monopoly, which makes abuse far easier for them to abuse the market to the point it is difficult to avoid. Time for some scrutiny.
Using your monopoly in one market (search) to tilt the playing field for your product in another (browser) is a textbook example of anticompetitive behaviour. Browser products should be allowed to compete on their own terms.
User-Agent headers, and browser fingerprinting in general, are the worst idea ever made for the web.
Seriously, put up standardised content. If it doesn't display, either you code is not-to-standard, or their device is. Guess who suffers? The party who skimped on their implementation (i.e. you because your website doesn't work for your customers, or them because they can't get on standard websites that others can).
The second we said "Okay, so what are you accessing it on, so I can fix my rubbish site to take account of your particular quirks", we lost the point of the web.
"I have plenty of hearsay and supposition, those are kinds of evidence." If the browser isn't displaying properly according to the standards, and they serve up the same results to everyone, then they cannot be held responsible, and are not at fault. Conversely, to intentionally dole out different results to different people makes them involved and therefore legally culpable. The intelligent thing to do would be to not change the results.
I am frequently amazed how Americans manage to make things be about the right to be able to kill other people at the squeeze of a trigger.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The definition (from Merriam-Webster) of capitalism is:
an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
There is no requirement for well regulated or anything.
This is an example of the no true Scotsman fallacy. Concretely, pure capitalism seems to lead to monopolies. Instead of accepting this and thus that pure capitalism is not perfect, people try to change the definition of it.
And once again history repeats itself. Microsoft stole the crown of evil from IBM back in the late 80s-early 90s, now Google has conclusively stolen the mantle for themselves by doing the exact same anticompetitive bullshit.
I wonder who the next one will be, and how long it will take Google to stop being evil (a point which IBM have already reached; Windows 10's slurping shows that MS aren't there yet).
Realistically I think Firefox lost market share because every time users searched for something with the default search engine they were offered a 'faster' browser. And google also advertises chrome outside of the internet, advertising works. Are there any polls on this that don't just poll techies?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
There is no requirement for well regulated or anything.
There is if you want it to actually work in the real world. Dictionary definitions are pretty much useless here. There is nothing wrong with private ownership and profit motives and they routinely benefit society greatly. That said, we have centuries of evidence that in more than a few cases we have to make and enforce some rules to keep things moving smoothly. Anyone who denies this fact is either clueless or has ulterior motives.
Concretely, pure capitalism seems to lead to monopolies.
Only in some cases. Monopolies are not universally a bad thing - in some contexts they can be quite helpful. Utilities for example actually have the lowest costs when there is a monopoly. In some industries achieving a monopoly would be a good approximation of impossible even with no regulation of any kind. But in all cases any monopoly needs to be examined closely and regulated to some degree. I can think of no case where an unregulated monopoly has been a good thing for society.
Relevent XKCD
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
No it bloody does not! It has a serious case of Dunning-Kruger when thinking about the subject. Google search mostly returns a pile of utter garbage, unless you want to buy a fashion item on Amazon (I presume - I don't buy fashion items, and don't use Amazon).
A cage full of deranged hamsters could probably return better results using systemd.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Concretely, pure capitalism seems to lead to monopolies. Instead of accepting this and thus that pure capitalism is not perfect, people try to change the definition of it.
Um... ok, you "win", let's say that capitalism doesn't by definition require regulation. Now that that epic and meaningful battle is over, can we get on with talking about how regulation is needed EVEN IF IT'S NOT PART OF THE DEFINITION?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.