Firefox and the 4-year battle for Google to treat her as a first-class citizen



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It has been more than five years since Firefox really took a turn and began to turn into a fast browser like today.

During this period, memories of webpage artifacts and irregularities have more or less disappeared if you use it as your desktop browser. As for its mobile experience, well, it's a WebKit-centric world, and one should not go further than Google to see how Firefox is relegated to lower versions of pages.

Buried in the Mozilla follower in February 2014, and still needs to be solved: Google has treated Firefox for Android as a first-clbad citizen and offers content comparable to that the search giant delivers to Chrome and Safari.

After years of requests, meetings and It has reached a point where Firefox developers are experimenting by manipulating the user agent chain in its nightly development versions to entice Google to think that Firefox Mobile is a Chrome browser.

Not only does Google's search page degrade to Firefox on Android, but some new properties like Google Flights have sometimes taken absolute block off the browser. In the last few months, I've used Firefox Mobile as my main mobile browser and I've arrived on Google Flights, and although I have not been stuck, it has failed in some places – at the time of the writing, it seems that the site is very good.

Regarding Google's flagship search page, Firefox users get a lower version that does not even have the toolbar that allows users to restrict searches by date. I have a hard time believing that in 2018, the most-visited webpage in the world does not find the little time and resources needed to provide a comparable page to non-WebKit browsers, even if it's not the same. they represent a tiny part of its content. visitors.

"We strive to provide an excellent search experience on all browsers, and we continue to work to improve this for all users," said a Google spokesperson to ZDNet

" Firefox uses the Gecko engine to do extensive testing on all our features to ensure compatibility, as it is different from WebKit (which is used by Chrome, Safari, UC, Opera). We have done it for the desktop. Firefox, but did not do the same level of testing for mobile. "

It should be noted that Firefox on iOS and the Firefox Focus browser both use the WebKit rendering engines provided by the system. running on iOS and Android, and therefore do not suffer from these problems.

ZDNet is testing a "new experience" for Firefox users who will be dealing with these issues.

One could certainly hope that the European Commission is interested in why Chrome's main competitor on desktop navigation is retained on the only platform that allows third-party rendering engines. owned by Google.

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Monday morning opener from ZDNet

Monday morning opener is our opening salvo for the week in technology. Since we are managing a global site, this editorial publishes Monday at 8:00 am EST in Sydney, Australia, which is Sunday at 6:00 pm eastern time in the United States. It is written by a member of ZDNet's global editorial board, composed of our senior editors in Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States.

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