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Comment by meerita | Hacker News Reader

I know many great guys from Google, they take very seriously all browser compatibility. I cannot think any company who took browser compatibility to the levels of Google. This fellow just made a big mistake developing something particular for a couple of browsers. It's not in Google ADN.

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IDK, I worked at Google for a long time and the people who cared about browser compatibility by far the most were the Chrome and Workspace teams. The Chrome team tried to emphasis that it made it very hard to negotiate web standards and made them look bad if Google had Chrome-only properties and Workspace wanted browser compatibility because they needed to officially support browsers that their customers were mandated to use (but they didn't really care about the long tail of browsers).

Google's homepage is probably the most extreme example ever made for browser compatibility.

Only if compatibility means "at least some functionality". Anything but latest Chrome, Safari or desktop Firefox gets a super basic version even though there appears to be no technical rationale. Just "it is too hard to test this on all of those browsers". Just faking the QA string gets you a working "chrome" experience.

What functionality is missing? Is it anything that people actually care about?

I did a search from Internet Explorer in Mac OS 9 a couple of years ago. I put in a term and a list of results came up. That's really all I could ask for.

If I look up lyrics to a song that's in a different language it will display the lyrics, but only chrome will offer the ability to click a button and translate.

Every time I visit Google with another browser I see a big pop-up which asks me to switch to Chrome.

That's marketing, not browser compatibility :)

I'm guessing that Mozilla takes browser compatibility even more seriously. And here's an addon to change the user-agent string for Google search so you get the same experience as a Chrome user: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search.... Off the top of my head, Google Groups content often hangs on my mobile Firefox browser, while Chrome access is always speedy.

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