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It has been a little over five years since Firefox took the turn and refocused the evolution of its software to make it the fast and lightweight browser that it is today. This period allowed Firefox to get rid of the main problems of displaying web pages, which have more or less disappeared on the desktop version of the browser. On mobile, Webkit dictates the deal and just look at the processing of Google's search engine to realize that Firefox is forced to settle for lower versions.
In the depths of Mozilla's bug tracker is a bug ticket opened in February 2014 that has still not been solved: force Google to treat Firefox as a full-fledged browser and to serve it with comparable results to those offered on Chrome and Safari.
After years of negotiations and round-trip, the problem has come to such a point that developers of mobile Firefox have chosen to experiment on their own by manipulating the data of their User Agent in order to push Google to identify their browser as Chrome or Safari.
And it is not only the search engine that offers degraded service to Firefox Mobile users, some services, such as Google Flight, are sometimes completely inaccessible on third-party browsers. In recent months, I've been using Firefox as my primary mobile browser, and I've found that if access to the Google Flight service was finally unlocked, many aspects of the app would inevitably get bugged on Firefox.
Regarding Google's search results, Firefox users have a reduced version of Google's flagship search engine: it does not even have drop-down menus to narrow a search by date. And I can hardly believe that in 2018, the most visited web page in the world can not find the time and resources to offer a similar experience to browser users not relying on Webkit.
"We want to provide a consistent experience for all browsers and we continue to work to improve the experience of all our users. Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine, which requires us to thoroughly test each of the new features because it does not work like Webkit, the engine used by Chrome, Safari and Opera. We did it for the desktop version of Firefox, but we do not have the same level of mobile testing, "said a Google spokesman interviewed by Zdnet.com
It should be remembered that the iOS version of Firefox as well as the Firefox Focus browser both use rendering engines provided by their OS, running on Webkit. They do not suffer from this problem.
Google explained to ZDNet that Firefox was working on "a new experience" that would address all of these issues.
We can hope for it. Unless the European Commission is interested in why Chrome's main competitor on the desktop is also limited on a platform officially authoring third-party rendering engines, and owned by Google.
This article is a translation of "Firefox and the 4-year battle to have a first-clbad citizen" originally published on ZDNet.com
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