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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

> I'm glad those days are over.

Those days aren't over yet.

Google Earth says "Google Chrome is required to run the new Google Earth" or "Oh no! Google Earth isn't supported by your browser yet" if you try to use another browser:

https://www.google.com/earth/

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At least that's not just because of a user agent string.

Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cro...

Google does not just do this for Maps. Observe how different a Google Search results page looks on Chrome vs Firefox on Android: https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ

I'm sure some will say they're more happy with the simpler interface, but the fact still remains that they're serving a lower quality version of the site (with no access to things like Search Tools to filter by date, for example) to non-Chrome users.

At the time, asm.js was the standard for high-performance web applications, and Google decided to go with a format only they used, with no backwards compatibility to any other browser, ignoring the back then WIP WebAssembly.

And despite using a simple compiler backend to compile their native code to NaCl that also allows support for asm.js and WASM in a matter of a few days (entire game engines have been ported that way), Google has been going for months and still kept it Chrome-only.

Did you read the article I linked? It explains why they went with NaCL over ASM, and why, despite them having a WASM prototype for months now, it's not ready for production yet.

Basically: native threading. NaCL supports it, ASM and WASM don't (yet).

Then don’t release it.

This isn’t the first time Google has released a product exclusively for Chrome, trying to pull more users to their own platform. Even if this is not directly intended, the result is a massive anticompetitive effect.

Or trying to access the web-based version of Remote Desktop in something else than Google Chrome https://remotedesktop.google.com/access

But switching the user-agent isn't enough in other browsers, Google must be using some fuckery in the background.

Switching the user agent isn't enough because it's not blindly relying on the user agent. It's actually doing feature detection so if your browser doesn't support whatever features used for remote desktop it'll give you an error message without relying on whitelisting a particular browser. This is exactly how web applications that need to use non-universal features should work, sure, look at the user agent for blacklisted browsers but use feature detection for what you can so that a new web browser that supports it will work without needing to modify the whitelisted user agents.

Or using the web version of Slack to make a call or screenshare.

Google has been doing that for a long time. For example, many years ago it showed a warning about an unsupported browser if you tried to visit Google Docs using Opera. Now it is using user-agent to choose Youtube UI version (if you are unlucky to use a modern browser, you will get that bright whitened UI with huge margins).

Also, web version of Skype isn't working in Android browser.

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