Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

AFAIK, the chrome user agent switcher extension only changes the agent on a JS level. You can't change what is being sent to the server due to limitations in the extension API.

This explains the Adsense warning because the server-side part of the framework used (gwt) is seeing a different user agent than what the client part is seeing.

Granted, UA sniffing is bad practice on either client or server side, but if you do it and send content tailored for browser A and then see that, strangely, the client is actually browser B, then you are probably allowed to be confused and complain (better than failing in strange ways).

Also knowing that, it's unlikely that something on the server side is causing these connection reset issues because, as I just said: the server still sees a chrome user agent and producing a connection reset error (RST packet) requires connection level involvement (server or somewhere in between, but never the client browser, minus bugs).

In general: be very careful what error messages you see: the Adsense error is different from the gmail error which in turn is (likely) different from the connection reset issue.

Overall there is too much conflicting information to attribute malice or even just intent to Google here.

If I were in that users position, I'd check my firewall and/or proxy configuration (and try disabling HTTP pipelining if it's active in Firefox - it's disabled by default for a reason) as the problem is much more likely somewhere over there.

I can't even get to it. Interested to know what this is about - for the past week I haven't been able to get to pages via my ipsd2 safari search - it goes straight back to the original search listing. I switch to "classic" mode and it's all OK.

Mozilla turn a significant profit through Google referrals, last time I looked. The 'splintered' browser market masks a fairly comfortable arrangement for both companies, as well as Opera. Don't assume a conspiracy where incompetence or poor fortune provides a better explanation - chances are the Gecko-optimised version you were loading had a minor bug, or there's a problem with your system. Perhaps you encountered some A/B testing gone wrong?

Firefox has SPDY support as of a version or two ago and uses SPDY on Google sites. I seem to that feature being on by default, even.

It could just be connection problems/wifi playing up/whatever, badly timed to coincide with the tests. I'm not sure this is much evidence really... Google previously have been all for an open and competitive browser market (part of the reason they started Chrome), they're not Microsoft in that regard, and I doubt they have some code somewhere along the lines of "if (!chrome) redirect_to_the_pentium_ii_in_the_basement();"