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Comment by kees99 | Hacker News Reader

> website which is "best viewed with Chrome"

I'm stunned. Is this still a thing? Last time I remember seeing websites recommending a browser, it was late 90s with "get Netscape" gifs.

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Google themselves launched or re-launched five Chrome-only sites last year (Hangouts, Meet, Adwords, Earth, and Allo). Six if you count the Google Advanced Protection Program.

Google Flights began blocking Firefox for Android last week, and Google still serves a degraded Search experience to Firefox users on Android (but hey, no AMP).

Despite well-meaning concern from the Chrome team, it's abundantly clear that Google's other product managers do not view interoperability with open, cross-browser standards as a requirement. And while many products eventually gain Firefox support, that support usually only comes months after launch, if at all. To wit, Earth was recently rebranded from "Earth on Web" to "Earth for Chrome," so who knows what's going to happen there.

Which I find especially hilarious because there was a period from 2014-2017 when hangouts worked better for me and my colleagues in other browsers

Allo works on Firefox now, but before, I used to set my user-agent to Chrome's and it'd work.

it's not a definition of working when you need to cheat system in order to get it working.

If the system is cheating you it's only fair you cheat it back... but I get what you mean; most users won't even know to do that or would be interested in doing it.

It's shady for Google to lie to their users especially when they imply its the browsers fault and not just their dev team being lazy gits and not validating that features work on Firefox.

Because that's the only valid excuse I could come up with that would make sense as to why they don't support it beside being shady that is...

Also noticed this with Google Flights last week. I dislike the way they position it, as if Firefox for Android is insufficient:

> Time for an upgrade. Looks like your browser needs a boost. To get the best Google Flights experience, upgrade to one of the supported browsers.

Funnily enough, it links to a site (http://whatbrowser.org/) that suggests Chrome, Opera, and Firefox as supported browsers.

Not only is it still a thing, Google itself is a major culprit of it. Seems like every new experiment they release is “best viewed” in — or worse, “requires” — Google Chrome.

Not just experiments. Neither Google Hangouts nor Meet worked in Firefox until the 22nd of May this year.

Google Flights is still not working in Firefox

What is not working? I have been using google flights to book trips for months without issues now. The only google services I've had some trouble with firefox are hangouts, and even that is fixed.

Try it on Android, where Google controls more of the market, and has less incentive for interop. You get a door slammed in your face: https://twitter.com/andrewhobden/status/1007668509826928640

Great response from Alex Russell, but it's clear that the sentiments of the Chrome team aren't translating into policy elsewhere in Google, or we wouldn't be dealing with something like this every few months.

Oh wow, I never noticed this before, this must be a recent thing...Thanks!

Oh, wow, Hangouts and Meet are working in Firefox now? I've been keeping Chrome running just for that for a couple of years, will be glad to stop having to do that.

Meet didn't even work in Chrome on Ubuntu 16.04 last time I checked. A customer of mine that went all Google talked about going back to Skype, which fixed most problems in the last months (with the obvious exception of the uselessly sparse layout.)

Meet works now? I knew about hangouts, but Meet was still not working last I checked. That would be fantastic if that was the case.

EDIT: So it does! The last reason I was keeping Chrome as my default (so Meet calendar invite links would work) is gone.

I've found that "work" in this case is still even a stretch. With it being the only application that I have open, with one tab on Firefox, these sites (but especially Inbox) cause my zBook to sound like it's mining Bitcoin or running SETI analysis.

Well yeah, if it's an experiment that demonstrates a feature that Firefox doesn't support then of course it will be best viewed in Chrome. Experiments shouldn't count here.

As soon as "experiment" stops meaning "soft launch" we can stop counting them.

It's quite a good filter, they can get user feedback with less risk of negative reviews.

Google Optimize requires both Chrome and a browser extension (which isn’t available for any other browser) to work.

Bank of America claims Firefox is an “unsupported browser”, so, yeah :/

You'll be surprised how well it works by just switching the user-agent. It's more of a "too lazy to make sure it works" than a "actually doesn't work and Chrome should be used" situation.

Too lazy to test probably. If you support IE, Safari, Chrome both on the desktop and mobile, chances are that your site supports practically everything.

Unfortunately, often giving the official thumbs up requires passing some test suite. If companies have gotten better with their development methodology, their testing methodology is still often "Take a bunch of guys in India and have then run through that extensive check list".

Unfortunately, yes, e.g. Google Earth: https://www.google.com/earth/

I'm dealing with this now. We're working on a very complex map visualization with D3, and Firefox runs it choppy as hell. On the other hand, WebKit/Blink browsers (Chromium, GNU Web (Epiphany), others) run it buttery smooth.

Given that everyone else on my team uses Chrome, I think we'll likely be sporting a "works best in Chrome" banner soon, especially as most people would be confused by "works best in WebKit/Blink".

Are you in a position to file a Firefox bug with a link to a page showing the problem? If you can do that and tell me the bug report url, I'll take a look.

Don't know if it is an issue of Firefox or Google just makes it slow, but viewing custom Google maps with few thousands of pins takes much longer time to parse and render in Firefox than in Chrome, where it feels almost instantaneous compared to Firefox.

Just today I tried browsing Google Flights on (the latest version of) Firefox mobile and not only did it recommend getting a "browser upgrade", it would not let me use the site at all.

Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/2CCRVDf

Outside of the Google projects people have mentioned, I hardly ever see this. Well, I do see "doesn't work on IE" or "please dear god stop visiting with IE 6" pretty often, but I can hardly blame sites for that...

There are many job postings, payment forms(!?) and financial websites that only work properly in Firefox. The best part is, for job postings, it's a great "not going to work there" filter.

Don't be too quick to dismiss a workplace because of something like that. Teams that are hiring often have very little control over the initial process (e.g.: the site where jobs are posted), but may be doing amazing things and be great to work with.

Yep. You can't use google hangouts without chrome. I've seen other websites (non-google) doing the same. Chrome is the new IE it seems :(

Well, at least this new IE is open-source, cross-platform, and way better than that browser which reached a 90% usage peak some time ago.

Joking aside, I've never really known the difference between Google Talk, Hangouts, etc, but I regularly chat with my contacts from the Gmail website, using Firefox, without any problem so far.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17364039 says Hangouts’ usable in firefox once more.

I can tell you that it's pretty touch and go. They don't even support screensharing in Chromium, did you know that?

Meet did start to work in latest Firefox recently, and then this week they broke mic audio. -.-

Yes, Google Flights refuses to work with Firefox and asks to switch to Chrome

*on mobile

For anyone confused.

Well, "best viewed in IE" was the thing till 2010 or so. The Chrome version I have never seen except on sites experimenting with advanced features unavailable elsewhere.

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