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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

Google intentionally gimps Firefox on Android, by serving an old-school page. Using an addon (which you can on mobile Fx, and not on Chrome), fixes this by editing the UA string when visiting Google.

Getting the "nice experience", however, gives me amp links. And when I click on them, I'm unable to scroll?! It doesn't matter if it loads fast, when I cannot read beyond the fold.

It also breaks the "open in app" I normally have. If the link is a reddit link, for instance, I can press an icon in Firefox to have it open in "Reddit is fun".

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There is a bug report [1] that tracks Google serving a second tier search experience for Firefox for Android.

Google has been dragging their feet for years on this one, and it perfectly fits their "oopsies" pattern of behavior [2], which ends up hurting their competition.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444

[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...

This is yet another case where Google probably has minimal to no benefit from doing it, but when produced collectively with other evidence in an anti-trust case will do an incredible amount of damage.

Believe it or not but the web is literally unusable if I use any other browser not based on chrome because:

- The search is degraded (it hides the advanced search menu in Google and most dropdowns in ff)

- Most of the sites use Recaptcha or cloudflare (also an extension of recaptcha) which gives you a low bot score if you're using anything other than chrome and then begins the never ending exercise of identifying cars and traffic lights

- I think web devs are also only testing for chrome nowadays and a lot of big and small sites just won't render properly with FF (the PH menu won't open on ff android for me unless I change the ua). It's not always chrome's fault though as many sites (like dictation.io) insist I use chrome because ff still won't support some web apis.

None of those are true in my experience using Firefox or Safari. I don’t know if you are using extensions or something like Tor but it might be worth trying again in a clean install.

Idk, but this has been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time now and I've posted about it before also with screenshots [1] and lot of people have agreed they have faced the same problems and we had a long discussion about it.

So there is definitely truth in it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20295333

I’m definitely not saying that you aren’t experiencing it, only that it’s uncommon and usually seems to be triggered by using a VPN or other shared connections.

Using neither. No addons or vpn or anything. Can't really say about shared connections if that is something my ISP is doing but the point is shouldn't vpn or shared connections affect chrome browser equally? Yet this only happens when using ff.

If you read the thread above a lot many people face this too, so at least this Recaptcha bs is quite true and prevalent.

can't be that "literally unusable" since I've been using FF for over 10 years and never had any of these issues

The only ones i come in contact with are horrible captchas on FF and god awfully slow gmail(that looks loaded but takes minutes(!) to work)

Are you using a VPN or other high-latency connection? In a clean Firefox install, Gmail takes a couple seconds to be usable — not as fast as I'd like but nowhere near a minute even on marginal WiFi.

The ReCaptcha annoyance has gotten better for me recently. In about 50% of cases, I get the green checkmark without having to solve any puzzles.

I occasionally have captcha issues (which usually ends with me leaving the site altogether) but it's likely due to all the addons I have like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. Google desperately wants to know who you are and where you're going. Annoying captchas are the response to saying "none of your business"

This just makes Google look bad. Don't use it. DuckDuckGo delivers a much better experience.

The amp problem I have on Firefox for Android is that AMP links to TomsHardware articles never load. I have to re-write the URL to replace "amp" with "www" to be able to read an article.

Can you place share how you find a Tom's Hardware AMP page? I work at Mozilla and would like to test this. Google Search in Firefox for Android just returns regular www URLs. If I manually change "www." to "amp." (reversing your fix), I get a 404 page, not an AMP article.

Edit: I copied an AMP URL (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tomshardware.com/...) from Google search in Chrome. I posted email it into Firefox and it redirected to a www. page on tomshardware.com that loaded successfully.

YouTube's management UI's performance in Firefox has been terrible since the Polymer migration (a baffling choice since Polymer was already clearly a failed initiative when they undertook that migration) and looks like it will never be fixed.

Hangouts-in-Gmail has had a memory leak in Firefox for more than a year eventually freezes its tabs.

When you're a monopoly, you can get away with a lot.

Google's not done 'til only Chrome runs.

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