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Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

thepowerbase.com

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Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#31

Post by mbrubeck »

padraigm wrote: post #27
xoebus wrote: post #13

Could it be that this is an innocent mistake or a bug in the way that Google servers are sending HTTP. Chrome wouldn't be affected as it will be using SPDY for all Google services. As soon as Chrome switched back to the Firefox user agent it started using HTTP again and the same bug was found. Besides, this just doesn't make sense. If this was an attempt to make Firefox look bad then it's a dreadful one. This just se…

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.

SPDY isn't enabled by default until Firefox 13 (currently on the beta channel, scheduled for release in four weeks).

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#32

Post by steve8918 »

I ran into similar problems at work where I am behind a proxy, where my connection would time out to sites like gmail, etc. I think it had something to do with cookies. When I revisited a site that timed out, but I went in incognito-mode, I was able to instantly see it.

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#33

Post by tomerv »

tubbo wrote: post #20
tomerv wrote: post #6

Does this mean that Google has given up completely on net neutrality? This is a very bad notion.

This article has nothing to do with net neutrality.

I think it has a lot to do with it. Maybe not directly, but at the heart of it, net neutrality is (in my opinion) about dividing resources equally.

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#34

Post by w1ntermute »

mgkimsal wrote: post #8

I've been pretty consistent in my Firefox use the past few years (probably >80% of my browsing is in Firefox), and I've never encountered this. Ever. I'm doing nearly all of this from OSX, with occasional browsing from FF and IE in a Windows VM or FF in a Linux VM. Perhaps this is more to do with a Linux string being picked up vs the Firefox aspect?

I've almost exclusively been using Linux on Firefox as my main browser for the last 5 years. I also use pretty much every Google service under the sun, and I've never seen any of these problems.

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#35

Post by [deleted] »

pilif wrote: post #21

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 d…

[deleted]

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#36

Post by evmar »

Another potential possibility:

Ubuntu Firefox is Mozilla's Firefox coupled with arbitrary modifications by the Ubuntu developers. In principle I respect Ubuntu's position and desire to make things right by their users.

But in practice, having been in the same relationship as an author of Chrome for Linux I can tell you that it's always dangerous to have people who aren't browser developers make modifications to a browser. More than once the Ubuntu Chromium packager made changes to Chrome that were harmful for users because they didn't understand the consequences of their changes.

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#37

Post by uulbiy »

angry-hacker wrote: post #28
cnbeuiwx wrote: post #19

I never get any errors with Firefox on Windows, so this was a interesting article. I will have to try it out some more on my Linux. However, I got loads of "Connection was reset" when trying to use the powerbase site where this article was. Server seems very very slow or something is wrong with it.

I get errors with Firefox on Ubuntu, but never on Windows... Off topic: the pagination with blogs/news sites articles is total nonsense...

I used to get the gmail message all the time with firefox on linux. My solution was to use chromium for gmail and firefox for the rest.

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#38

Post by simonbrown »

pilif wrote: post #21

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 d…

It's possible that it hasn't been updated yet, but extensions can now change the user agent sent to the server.

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/webRequest.html

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#39

Post by Dylan16807 »

pilif wrote: post #21

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 d…

I would be surprised to have an internet company as big as google screw up pipelining. How likely is that?

Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?

#40

Post by Dylan16807 »

tomerv wrote: post #33
tubbo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article has nothing to do with net neutrality.

I think it has a lot to do with it. Maybe not directly, but at the heart of it, net neutrality is (in my opinion) about dividing resources equally.

Net neutrality is about ISPs.
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