I've been using Ubuntu for years with both Chrome and Firefox and I've never seen issues like Firefox getting higher connection resets. I'm happy to ask people at Google to dig into this report, but I have to say this sounds completely off base to me. Google wants Google.com to work well with with Firefox.
Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
41–50 of 72 posts
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#42AFAIK, 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?
Not likely. But any proxy server in between might very well have. Including a transparent proxy on the ISPs side that the original poster knows nothing about
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#43if (document.querySelector('h1').innerHTML.match(/^Is .*\?$/)) { console.log('Probably not.') }
Fixed:
if (document.querySelector('.title a').innerHTML.match(/^Is .*\?$/)) { console.log('Probably not.') }
(HN's markup is terrible, it doesn't use headers)
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#44On a related note, do not use user agent sniffing. Use feature detection. Sniffing is fragile and will be immediately out of date when browsers upgrade / add new features.
You shouldn't care which browser it is, you should care what features it supports (or doesn't).
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#45AFAIK, 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?
pretty likely.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#46For the record, the article poses a simple question and makes light of the fact that the results are inconclusive. It should be taken with a grain of salt, as the author intended.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#47Another 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 bro…
Maintaining Chromium packages on Linux is a nightmare. Here's the line count for different browser packages on Gentoo:
408 chromium/chromium-20.0.1123.4.ebuild
349 firefox/firefox-12.0.ebuild
42 rekonq/rekonq-0.9.2.ebuild
98 midori/midori-0.4.5.ebuild
90 epiphany/epiphany-3.4.1.ebuild
61 conkeror/conkeror-1.0_pre20120223.ebuild
64 dillo/dillo-3.0.2.ebuildRe: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#48This article, with its black text on dark grey background, is incredibly hard for me to read. It's almost like the author didn't want it to be read.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#49Another 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 bro…
Maintaining Chromium packages on Linux is a nightmare. Here's the line count for different browser packages on Gentoo: 408 chromium/chromium-20.0.1123.4.ebuild 349 firefox/firefox-12.0.ebuild 42 rekonq/rekonq-0.9.2.ebuild 98 midori/midori-0.4.5.ebuild 90 epiphany/epiphany-3.4.1.ebuild 61 conkeror/conkeror-1.0_pre20120223.ebuild 64 dillo/dillo-3.0.2.ebuild
So, it's of the same order of difficulty as Firefox? Is this surprising?
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#50It 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…
> if (!chrome) redirect_to_the_pentium_ii_in_the_basement();
I believe that code might go something more like
> if (!SPDY-capable) redirect_to_regular_somewhat_overloaded_http_load_balancers_without_resetting_client_ttl_value();