TL;DR: No.
Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#52Another 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
The interesting question isn't the raw number, it's what those 408 lines are doing - it's entirely possible that half of that could go upstream.
For some years, lots of vendors had patches to mess around with perl's default @INC order, all of which were distro-specific and not really generalisable, because nobody had bothered to submit the upstream change that would have got rid of that whole class of patches.
Now, I suspect the reasons for that may have been to do with perl's then rather slower pace of releases, so people didn't see the point when perl5 version 10 was apparently not getting any closer, but just because that reason doesn't apply to chromium doesn't mean there isn't a similarly convincing one for local patches.
It also doesn't mean there -is-; I've always been fond of local patches to software being corresponded with a distro bug and preferably with an upstream bug explaining the rationale; it may not avoid the necessity for the patch but it at least means the conversation that led to it is both visible and involved the right people.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#53I'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 use firefox and chrome and experience these problems intermittently but only under firefox.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#54I'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.
A long time ago, I went through a period where I was getting a lot of resets. But now, I'm just fine.
Perhaps it's just a problem with the particular machines he's connecting to? I use Firefox almost exclusively and I haven't seen any resets for ages now.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#55I would also suspect there could be something amiss in his ISP or network path to affected sites.
Perhaps changing the User-Agent is making a difference, but not in the way he expects. For example, his 'Firefox' User-Agent is 77 characters long, while his 'Chrome' User-Agent is 106. That might be the difference between some packets more often being a size that triggers a problem somewhere on the path. (Or, the string or size might be triggering different handling in some transparent proxy.)
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#56I'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.
A long time ago, I went through a period where I was getting a lot of resets. But now, I'm just fine. Perhaps it's just a problem with the particular machines he's connecting to? I use Firefox almost exclusively and I haven't seen any resets for ages now.
I am using firefox, and chrome on linux for 5 years already, and didnt notice such an error. I hope and don't expect Google to do ever such a trick to ff.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#57I'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.
Right, it would make absolutely no sense for Google to try to make its services work less well on Firefox. Everybody using Google on Firefox is just as much a win for Google as everybody using Google on Chrome, the only thing that they get from their own web browser is not having to pay Mozilla to make Google the default search engine.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#58Does this mean that Google has given up completely on net neutrality? This is a very bad notion.
"Does this mean that Google has given up completely on net neutrality? This is a very bad notion."
Wow, break out the tinfoil hats.
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#59I 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...
> pagination with blogs/news sites articles is total nonsense
Furthering the derail: Increases ad-space. Makes perfect simple sense to me, though I may not agree with it all the time (or ever).
Re: Is Google Burying Firefox With User Agent Strings?
#60Doubt it. Tiny results set, huge accusations.
Works fine for me, Chrome & FF on Windows.