It looks deliberate but it's also not clear to me which is the "better" version. It doesn't look like one has more features or is obviously newer or better. (i personally like the second screenshot better, but i think the rounded boxes in the first screenshot is actually google's latest design fad)

You can sometimes trigger similar changes in appearance to the search results view by switching to incognito or clearing your cookies - Google often A/B tests or performs slow rollouts of changes like this, a difference in appearance could just be because a new user agent string got you placed into a different release group.

It’s more apparent on other things - I probably should have searched for flights or movies or something else more interactive. Firefox-as-itself doesn’t get any nice features like upcoming movie times without going into other websites, while Firefox-pretending-to-be-Chrome does.

Honestly at this point I’d like to give up on the user agent header and have everybody say they’re Chrome all the time.

I was reacting to "just today's stock price" versus "today's price plus some history".

In the first screenshot you see third party news stories above the fold and in the second story there's nothing but knowledge cards above the fold. Both are presenting relevant information (and no ads) but which format is preferable? My guess is that certain knowledge cards (like stock price history) are subtly less functional on FF so they are omitted.

I'm seriously skeptical of that. It's plausible they didn't bother trying to get it to work in FF, and just thought "screw that". But judging by de screenshot of the stock price history alone, clearly FF has no trouble rendering that history - both screenshots are FF, right? It's only the UA header that was changed.

Incidentally, this is far from the first time google has been caught heavily optimizing exclusively for their own browsers, which, to be clear, is quite probably not explicit policy - but is monopolistic abuse nonetheless. Remember the youtube polymer redesign? The Edge HW acceleration-breaking invisible layers? I get the feeling they just don't test in other browsers nearly as well.

A static screenshot does not fully capture the functionality of a web element, hence my use of the term "subtly".

Occam's Razor suggests you're looking for ghosts, and just to be sure I tried this on my phone: as far as I can tell behaviour using FF + chrome UA addon (which I specifically installed to test this) is indistinguishable from chrome as far as google search's stock ticker display goes. focusing points, time spans, toggle modes, clicking the extra-info chevron... all no difference.

Given google's history here you really shouldn't be giving them the benefit of the doubt in this matter; at best they're consistently, repeatedly negligent; but it's at least conceivable there's culture of giving additional other google teams; which is a form of monopolistic power abuse.

Oh yeah, that didn't even register to me. But still, when you get recommended stories vs when you get info cards is such black magic that i wouldn't assume that's necessarily firefox vs chrome either.

They are doing the same to Palemoon too. a few regular sites are recently failing to load within Palemoon.

Not a fan of Firefox and I refuse to like or use chrome.