Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android • Hacker News Board

dblohm7 wrote: post #200

johnkpush wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's browser vendors that are bearing the torch of interoperability and standards compliance. Unfortunately, most vendors are companies with their own agenda. To add to that, all companies and people interpret standards differently. Given this, it's no wonder we don't see consistent api implementation and behaviors between browsers. The aftermath of all of this falls on the developer's shoulders, which is why so many…

"When you start using a seemingly mature HTML5 api, and find that it doesn't work as expected in all browsers, what recourse does one have?" File bugs. Chromium and Firefox are not black boxes.

or here's an opportunity to start contributing to open source!

Re: Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android

#235

Post by Too » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:28 AM UTC

Clickbait headline. As bad as this is, the headline make it sound like Firefox was removed from the play store all together, which is far far worse.

Re: Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android

#236

Post by kapok » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:14 AM UTC

eginhard wrote: post #215

andreastt wrote: post #99

For reference, this is being tracked by Mozilla's webcompat group in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1131601 .

And it was apparently "blocked by mistake and will be fixed very soon": http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/10/google-play-no-longer-supp...

Come one, don't be naive... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668275

The whole point of web standards is to create a - you know - "standard" basis everybody can build upon. If your webapp doesn't work on a given recent browser (firefox latest is both recent and decent), you're doing it wrong.

And Google has been doing it wrong for years (since 2011 for Gmail). Not only is it wrong in the sense that it's poorly developed, but it's also wrong in any other sense of the word (evil, bad,...).

We're talking about a company that develops a web browser and that, in 2015, serves barely usable version of their services when the UA doesn't match its own.

Edit (for the sake of completeness): if you don't spoof the UA of firefox mobile, you can't use gmail except for painfully reading e-mails.

Re: Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android

#237

Post by bighi » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 1:07 PM UTC

madez wrote: post #105

bighi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, not the spying argument again...

I would like to understand you but I don't yet. Why do you refuse an argument just because it was used in another occasion? That appears to me to be a logical fallacy. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The heart of the argument - that is the demand not to be spied upon - seems to be to be perfectly reasonable and justified due to economic and security aspects. Care to weigh in?

Looking at English dictionaries I found two main meanings of spying:

1) Observing a target with hostile intents.

2) Acquiring and tracking information.

Google has never been hostile towards me. I've never lost money because of Google, or had health damage, or had naked pictures of me released to the web, etc. No "harm" done to me by Google, either literal harm or figurative harm.

So, number 2. If people are complaining of Google tracking information, 99% of things in your computer track your information. Even a simple 'sudo ls' in linux is tracking SOME information to allow you to run other sudo commands without inputting your password again for a while. A computer software that does not store information is usually quite limited.

What harm (and I accept a loose definition of harm here) comes from Google remembering what search you did yesterday or when was the last time you logged on to gmail?

Re: Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android

#238

Post by scholia » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #230

scholia wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that the "lost decade" when we got LinkedIn, Skype, Second Life, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Pandora, Twitter and many of the other things on which we now depend?

Read the comment I was replying to and note that it says “web technology” rather than “web sites”. While people built some great things they did so with significant limitations and had to use features which were not standardized. XmlHttpRequest is a great example – it was used by most of the sites you mentioned but wasn't even submitted as a standard for a full 7 years after it first shipped.

See comment from jordanlev above: "Also hints at the idea that the stability of IE6 for a while actually created a good environment for innovation in the web app space to take place"

Came along and made the point I was making....

Re: Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android

#239

Post by scholia » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

john61 wrote: post #229

scholia wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a reaction to Microsoft's refusal to use the web > standards that every other major browser supported Take your points, but in fact, Microsoft didn't refuse to support web standards. IE6 was more standards-compliant than Netscape when it came out. The main problem was that Microsoft stopped developing browsers (for complicated reasons that must include the US anti-trust suits). That put it years behind in standards…

Please elaborate why the anti trust suits did MS stop from developing a standards compliant browser.

Never said they did.

Re: Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android

#240

Post by mkr-hn » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

nathanb wrote: post #202

gcb0 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i disagree. i think what we all must do is tell everyone exactly that. "don't use Google play store, it's like ie6. use fdroid and be happy". and then we all drop support to it, just like we dropped support to ie6 and it's bullying tactics, even though we own ajax to it, there's so much abuse one can take. do your part for free software. but yeah, i know that building your startup on top of a free software stack mean…

+1 because the existence of fdroid had not penetrated the rock under which I live before now.

I've wanted something exactly like this for my Kindle since getting it. Amazon's store isn't bad, but it's missing a lot of weird little things you find on less restrictive platforms.