<story><title>“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”</title><url>https://vivaldi.com/blog/google-return-to-not-being-evil/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>(I used to work on the webserver for Google Search.  Left Google several years ago, have no more vested interest in them.)&lt;p&gt;The reason for the browser-sniffing in search is a combination of ease of testing + latency reduction.  By supporting a known set of browsers, you can write a test plan for each and shard it out among contractors (or ideally, automate it with a Selenium config).  Manual tests run on every release (2&amp;#x2F;week when I left, maybe more now), and automated tests run on every changelist (thousands&amp;#x2F;week), so you can see how adding additional browsers to the testing matrix can consume significant resources.  Very often cutting-edge features will launch on Chrome only and then if users like them, they&amp;#x27;ll get ported over to all the other browsers.  (Or, just as often, the project is canceled and the feature is unlaunched on Chrome a year later, which IMHO isn&amp;#x27;t a great habit on Google&amp;#x27;s part but it is what it is.)&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re manually spoofing your user agent, then Google figures that you know what you&amp;#x27;re doing and it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;use at your own risk anyway&amp;quot;, and that if you get a broken experience, your first thought will be to disable the user-agent spoofing.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, browser-sniffing lets you serve only the JS needed for that particular browser, and not all of the hacks&amp;#x2F;polyfills&amp;#x2F;bugfixes&amp;#x2F;workarounds needed for browsers that the user isn&amp;#x27;t using.  This is probably less of an issue now that things are more standard, but when I started (&amp;#x27;09), not needing to serve all of the IE6 workarounds when the user was on Chrome or Firefox saved &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; of latency for users that were on modern browsers.</text></item><item><author>Jonnax</author><text>Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile.&lt;p&gt;If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution.&lt;p&gt;Use a user agent spoofer like this:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-GB&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;addon&amp;#x2F;chrome-ua-on-google-android&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-GB&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;addon&amp;#x2F;chrome-ua-on-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And it seems to work fine on Firefox.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers on mobile, like it&amp;#x27;s the new Internet Explorer with some modern day ActiveX</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>int_19h</author><text>The real problem here is optics. There are certainly many valid technical and business reasons to target specific browsers - we&amp;#x27;ve heard them all back in the day when &amp;quot;Best viewed in Internet Explorer&amp;quot; was a standard disclaimer on more than half of all websites out there. That arrangement did not work to the advantage of either the users or Google, though. So Google invested significant resources in web standards and alternative browsers, breaking the Microsoft monopoly. But now that Chrome is rapidly approaching the position that IE held, the users and the web developers are getting a feeling of deja vu, and Google&amp;#x27;s behavior - however motivated - plays right into that.</text></comment>
<story><title>“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”</title><url>https://vivaldi.com/blog/google-return-to-not-being-evil/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>(I used to work on the webserver for Google Search.  Left Google several years ago, have no more vested interest in them.)&lt;p&gt;The reason for the browser-sniffing in search is a combination of ease of testing + latency reduction.  By supporting a known set of browsers, you can write a test plan for each and shard it out among contractors (or ideally, automate it with a Selenium config).  Manual tests run on every release (2&amp;#x2F;week when I left, maybe more now), and automated tests run on every changelist (thousands&amp;#x2F;week), so you can see how adding additional browsers to the testing matrix can consume significant resources.  Very often cutting-edge features will launch on Chrome only and then if users like them, they&amp;#x27;ll get ported over to all the other browsers.  (Or, just as often, the project is canceled and the feature is unlaunched on Chrome a year later, which IMHO isn&amp;#x27;t a great habit on Google&amp;#x27;s part but it is what it is.)&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re manually spoofing your user agent, then Google figures that you know what you&amp;#x27;re doing and it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;use at your own risk anyway&amp;quot;, and that if you get a broken experience, your first thought will be to disable the user-agent spoofing.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, browser-sniffing lets you serve only the JS needed for that particular browser, and not all of the hacks&amp;#x2F;polyfills&amp;#x2F;bugfixes&amp;#x2F;workarounds needed for browsers that the user isn&amp;#x27;t using.  This is probably less of an issue now that things are more standard, but when I started (&amp;#x27;09), not needing to serve all of the IE6 workarounds when the user was on Chrome or Firefox saved &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; of latency for users that were on modern browsers.</text></item><item><author>Jonnax</author><text>Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile.&lt;p&gt;If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution.&lt;p&gt;Use a user agent spoofer like this:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-GB&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;addon&amp;#x2F;chrome-ua-on-google-android&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-GB&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;addon&amp;#x2F;chrome-ua-on-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And it seems to work fine on Firefox.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers on mobile, like it&amp;#x27;s the new Internet Explorer with some modern day ActiveX</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nialv7</author><text>I interned at Google once. And the first thing they told us at the orientation is that they put the users first.&lt;p&gt;Is that a lie then? Because what you said seems to imply Google puts the convenience of the developers first.</text></comment>