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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.
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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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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no requirement for well regulated or anything.
There is if you want it to actually work in the real world. Dictionary definitions are pretty much useless here. There is nothing wrong with private ownership and profit motives and they routinely benefit society greatly. That said, we have centuries of evidence that in more than a few cases we have to make and enforce some rules to keep things moving smoothly. Anyone who denies this fact is either clueless or has ulterior motives.
Concretely, pure capitalism seems to lead to monopolies.
Only in some cases. Monopolies are not universally a bad thing - in some contexts they can be quite helpful. Utilities for example actually have the lowest costs when there is a monopoly. In some industries achieving a monopoly would be a good approximation of impossible even with no regulation of any kind. But in all cases any monopoly needs to be examined closely and regulated to some degree. I can think of no case where an unregulated monopoly has been a good thing for society.
Does anyone remember how Microsoft played similar games with DR-DOS by deliberately making their programs crash, complain, or do strange things when said programs noticed that the operating system was DR-DOS rather than MS-DOS? It's the same thing but with different players.
Because if you knew what you're talking about, you'd know that the progressive era anti-trust campaigns were started by REPUBLICAN Teddy Roosevelt.
#fail
Back to history class for you!
And if YOU actually knew history, you would know:
As Governor of New York, Roosevelt made a lot of waves with his anti-trust campaigns, and it really pissed off the Republicans. So, they came up with a plan to get rid of him.
When William McKinley was running for president in 1900, the Republicans nominated Roosevelt for Vice President because it's a do-nothing job with no real authority to do anything. Making Roosevelt Vice President would put an end to his anti-trust activities.
Unfortunately (for Republicans), McKinley died a month after taking office and Roosevelt became president.
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.
Um... ok, you "win", let's say that capitalism doesn't by definition require regulation. Now that that epic and meaningful battle is over, can we get on with talking about how regulation is needed EVEN IF IT'S NOT PART OF THE DEFINITION?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.