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

Posted by msmash on from the david-vs-goliath dept.

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.

4 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. Anti-Trust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sounds like a good case for an anti-trust suit.

  2. Monocultures are bad by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Re: If you're a loser who needs a government bailo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re: Orwellian doublespeak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.