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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
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 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.
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.