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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.
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!
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...
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.