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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.
I thought the days of delivering different content depending on the brand of browser was over. I guess some companies still think it is OK to provide different content to different platforms.
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Firefox is best browser i have ever use. But need some improvement like use Language translation option. So, we can read all language articles, news, and more things. Add this feature to firefox.
And I don't miss anything. Use ixquick, duckduckgo, searx. Don't use Google, period.
It takes some time to get used to (with no tracking, the search engine knows less about you, that means you've got to think a bit more about your search terms), but who wants to degenerate into some kind of jellyfish attached to Google? Remember: their business model depends on this happening, whereas your sanity depends on this not happening. Google and you are not allies!
...In the same way Trump is getting 'respect' from Putin. Trying to imitate your competitor absolutely and completely is no way to help either of you. The only thing you're going to get in return is mild amusement from your competition, and an audience confused about what you're even trying to offer them.
Killing plugins/statusbar/etc. was basically sabotaging everything that made Firefox hold an advantage. Trying to compete as a Chrome clone, just makes it useless as a choice.
I'll stick with Firefox 56 until a new browser based on that version takes off.
Ryan Fenton
Does anyone get respect from Google search? I search for two words, word1 and word2, and right there on page 1 of the results are many that don't include one of the necessary words. Farther down are words that are similar but wrong. And, still on page 1 of the results are finds that include neither word. Some results have oriental characters and no English at all.
Google says there are 52,200 results. I click on the last page and it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 300 already displayed.", except that there were less than 200 hits, very few of which matched the criteria.
Google used to inform users of the size of each web page in the results. A search result that was 10K bytes might be a good hit, but a search result page that was 4MB was probably a spam page with a long list of random words.
Much additional information was available about each search result that is now denied us. Those of us who haven't forgotten know that the information is available. Google has simply decided not to give it to us. After all these years is there no competitor that can replicate the original search engine and give Google some competition?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Be going thru this bullshit if Microsoft had been crushed in court like it should have been in the late 90s.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Chrome should never have been allowed to gain a dominant market share. But Firefox conceded market share with dropping XUL and its numerous UI “experiments” too. Google should be forced to have a “browser choice” screen on Android to give other browsers a chance.
Sadly, they fixed the performance issue, by destroying all their plugins and switching plugin types, so I've stopped using it.
No they didn't destroy all the extensions and many of the popular ones are long since back up and running. Noscript for example.
As for mobile systems, well that's sad too. Firefox is awful on mobile, just the interactivity with opening a tab.
works for me (tm). and it's the only way of getting Javascript-free browsing on android that I know of.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Tab me plus is critical for me, utterly critical, took 3 Chrome plugins to replicate it, but it's behaving as intended now.
Firefox it's unstable and Alpha, for the new plugin framework
Firefox mobile is atrocious, I do not know how you use this at all, as stated the sensitivity and hold down time, click detection for opening the context menu on a url is AWFUL. Chrome leaves it for dead on mobile.
I suspect Firefox is to be gone in the next few years, sad. I loved it very very much and was a die DIE hard supporter for a very long time, but too little, too late.
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/