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.

Comments

Re:Monocultures are bad

[cre1mer]

I work in a Windows shop and the default browser is Internet Explorer. A new help desk provider has a cloud-based solution that works only with Google Chrome. Most people at work found it odd that clicking on the help desk link in IE will launch Chrome to access the help desk website. Very odd, indeed.