It knows my user agent. It knows very well that the Firefox extension is the relevant result. This is 100% done out of malice.

Nor are user-agents in any way reliable.

Reliable enough to constantly break, penalize and nag me for using Firefox in other ways, apparently. This happens and is well-documented, not a conspiracy theory.

It's not uncommon that I'll have a customer try to tell me that some search or selection algorithm in our product that I wrote is making use of unknowable information to bias it's results.

I think that the anger is justified but it doesn't justify making up poorly substantiated conspiracy theories. The hard facts are enough to see what Google is doing anyway, no need to write fanfiction.

I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it, but it's clear that they make no effort to make their websites compatible and they don't appear to consider these issues like bugs. If it works on Chrome then it's good enough. I suspect that internally compatibility issues with Firefox are not even considered bugs at all, it's just the way it is and it's up to Mozilla to fix their browsers to be compatible with Chromium (I have no insider knowledge, but it's the way it feels from the outside).

Googlers push new code to production regularly, with the cycles getting faster all the time. It used to be biweekly (as the article alludes). Then it was weekly. Then it was daily. Then it was "push on every green build".

If you push to production literally the moment your test suite passes, then your browser compatibility is a function of two things:

1. What the engineers developing a feature use.

2. What is easiest to build automatic test suites with.

In both cases the answer was Chrome and Chrome. Firefox has never had good support for API driven embedding. Embedded Gecko never took off. The automated GUI test drivers that became popular were mostly WebKit/Chrome based, with some support for IE and using it via RDP to a VM. Nobody forces Googlers to use any particular browser but Chrome was the best so that's what they used.

Also, Google culturally is always on the bleeding/cutting edge of HTML stuff. So it's more likely to hit edge cases than others.

Result: occasional glitches where Firefox bugs or Google app bugs intersected. They always got fixed quickly when reported. Only crazy people would think this was some conspiracy involving tens of thousands of developers who mysteriously never leaked their evil plan.

Mozilla would have done themselves a world of benefit if they'd been pushing hard their own CI/integrated Gecko based test suite and made it the best.

Having been involved in a number of these reports, this is flat-out false. Basic "fix your CSS to not rely on this Chrome bug; here's the exact diff you want to make it work both in browsers that follow the CSS spec and in Chrome" things regularly take 2-3 months to apply on the Google side. Basic "your browser user-agent sniffing is broken _again_ in the same way as three months ago" things take a month or two to fix.

Disclosure: Mozilla employee, have been cced on far too many of these bug report threads over the years.

Disclosure: former Google employee, I did many pushes and fixed browser compatibility bugs whilst I was there.

In the timeframe we're talking about most products were on a biweekly push cycle. In the ideal case where there was no delay at all between you reporting a bug and it reaching the right person inside the company who could fix it, if that day happened to be on a branch cut day then that's a minimum of a two week delay to reach production unless the bug was so severe that the entire product was hosed for all Firefox users. Minor glitches in rarely used screens wouldn't count for a rollback or emergency push, for instance.

But sometimes pushes fail. There's a severe bug, attempts to fix it are too slow and the push window closes so the servers are rolled back. Now the latency is a month.

That's only software bugs. Now include the time taken for the bug report to be triaged, mis-directed, pinged, rerouted to the right person. Now include delays incurred if that person goes on holiday, gets sick or has other higher priority tasks, as bug handoff works about as well there as anyone else. That can easily add more time.

Finally, regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated. If they weren't testing Firefox well enough before they weren't testing it well enough after either. If Google had a central rule about which browsers had to be supported then I didn't know about it. There was just an assumption you'd try to support the browsers people used as best you could.

I'm not saying it was awesome or right, just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific and there were plenty of IE or Safari compatibility bugs too.

And just to be clear, there are certainly cases when things got fixed quickly. But "always" is really stretching it; this was the exception, not the norm.

> regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated

Sure. The problem is the environment and corporate policy, not individual engineers. They're just responding to incentives as best they can, and in my experience are generally quite helpful within the constraints of the system.

> just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific

Indeed, I don't think it was. It was not-Chrome specific.

Here's a thought experiment. Say someone at Google who did _not_ test in Chrome committed a change that degraded the visual experience of gmail in Chrome and it got shipped. How would fixing that be prioritized vs a similar visual degradation in Firefox or some other non-Chrome browser? Assuming there is no emergency push involved, if the fix was not ready by the next push cycle, would it just slide, or would the original commit get rolled back?

I can't quite recall the timelines, but I remember it felt like years before the Chrome team shipped a native Mac/Linux version. They also fixed a lot of bugs that broke features of the various apps, e.g. lack of printing was a big one for a while.

I imagine you're talking about later when Chrome got really big. But it's hard for me to say what would have happened because when the features are themselves being developed in Chrome there are hardly ever cases like that when it works in every browser except Chrome and this is somehow not noticed during the canary period.

Disclosure: xoogler with my name carved in stone outside Mozilla HQ.

Yep, that works too.

I was there. That was the headline cause of their legal troubles, but far from the only thing Microsoft got up to. They intentionally broke other sites, threw misleading messages and tried to play games with standards.

In other words, many actions that look familiar today with different actors.

My old laptop fans go crazy when I launch chrome. It’s too much heavy for a mail client.

It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years.

You might enjoy this talk if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

You get a much better experience with a native app, like MailMate or Thunderbird.

I just don't understand people using webmail on their workstations, especially Gmail. It was cool doing that in 2004, but it got old.

I actually got curious and tested Firefox with my personal gmail account (using it for >10 years, so it has tons of emails, filters etc). I did not notice any big issues, text rendering seems slightly different, maybe chrome version is slightly snappier but that's it.

I am not sure what exactly Gmail does on Firefox, but it makes using AOL.com in 2020 feel like a better email experience.

That goes both ways. I’m categorically not replacing Firefox with Chrome, and when Gmail became unbearable in Firefox I switched to something else.

Gmail is hardly a unique product, nor uniquely good in 2020, and it haven’t been for quite a few years.

I had to help someone with something the other day and saw the current version of gmail in safari and I feel sorry for anyone that has to use that.

Not sure what the captcha on Firefox 'feature' refers to but nothing springs to mind as not working in that department either.