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Firefox Spoofs Itself as Chrome

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Given that Google has the habit of provided "inferior versions of pages" to Firefox users, so says ZDNet. To get around this, Firefox devs are now experimenting with spoofing your browser to be identified as Chrome. This will turn out well assuredly.


After years of requests, meetings, and to and fro, it has hit a point where the developers of Firefox are experimenting by manipulating the user agent string in its nightly development builds to trick Google into thinking that Firefox Mobile is a Chrome browser.
 
This is actually a not uncommon problem among the various browsers. Typically the issue lies in code not having the proper designation for the newest versions of browsers and therefore defaulting to older versions or straight out breaking. I have had to spoof browser codes in dev environments before because of poorly written code.
 
jardows said:
Maybe it would help if there was a standard for web page development? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Hey...let's not jump to knee-jerk reactions. We need to be patient and see if this web thing catches on. When I say we, I mean our grandchildren's kids. Maybe future generations will develop a standard interpretation of standards. Possibly just before the web is EOL.
 
A recent redesign of blackmesasource.com started using mpegs/mp4s as backgrounds. On low end laptops it crushes firefox, chrome does slightly better. It was reported to the webmaster and as a temp fix firefox now gets a static image.
 
Retronym said:
Prediction: Now google will start to incorporate canvas data into search results.
Click to expand...

Canvas data in search results? What am I missing here?

Jim Kim said:
A recent redesign of blackmesasource.com started using mpegs/mp4s as backgrounds. On low end laptops it crushes firefox, chrome does slightly better. It was reported to the webmaster and as a temp fix firefox now gets a static image.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Was that before or after Quantum?

Honestly, having a video as a background is a really terrible idea. Unless you use full opacity or full transparency, performance is going to suffer greatly. I program for embedded systems where we don't have a lot of room for that sort of shit.
 
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Jim Kim said:
The update came out approximately June 21st.
Even using chrome my cpu usage says are you MINING or wat!
Click to expand...

Just checked their site. They are doing exactly what I said would kill the performance: having video and a semi-transparent layer on top of it. They have much to learn
 
dgz said:
Just checked their site. They are doing exactly what I said would kill the performance: having video and a semi-transparent layer on top of it. They have much to learn
Click to expand...
I will gladly post a suggestion but am not knowledgeable in what to say. If you have any brief/simple suggestions I'll pass them on. Or would it suffice to paraphrase what you stated, "Having video and a semi-transparent layer on top of it is what's killing performance."
And thanks for your input.
 
dgz said:
Honestly, having a video as a background is a really terrible idea. Unless you use full opacity or full transparency, performance is going to suffer greatly. I program for embedded systems where we don't have a lot of room for that sort of shit.
Click to expand...

Agreed.

While it can be done such that it works OK enough, (The PayPal logon page is a good example) why would you? This adds no benefit what so ever...
 
Jim Kim said:
I will gladly post a suggestion but am not knowledgeable in what to say. If you have any brief/simple suggestions I'll pass them on. Or would it suffice to paraphrase what you stated, "Having video and a semi-transparent layer on top of it is what's killing performance."
And thanks for your input.
Click to expand...

Oh, they'll get it. Just tell them to get rid of .center-block:before. They don't need it to cover the whole screen. Constantly calculate the color of so many pixels (it's video), you're gonna have a bad time. And for what?

Zarathustra[H] said:
Agreed.

While it can be done such that it works OK enough, (The PayPal logon page is a good example) why would you? This adds no benefit what so ever...
Click to expand...

Never used paypal. Which is why I am not a gold member.
 
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The problem is dumbass developers that let their personal preferences dictate what browsers they test against their sites. If they personally use Chrome, they only develop their sites for Chrome and leave everyone else out. "Upgrade to Chrome" is their fix. No, you build your site to be compatible with the majority of web browsers, which is Chrome, Firefox, IE 11, Edge, Opera, and Safari.
 
NoOther said:
This is actually a not uncommon problem among the various browsers.
Click to expand...

The issue here is that if FF spoofs the user agent and pretends to be Chrome, it gets the same page Chrome gets. IOW, it's not really a compatibility problem, it's Google saying "FF gets a degraded experience because for no reason". I read through the entire bug report history going back 4 years, and there's screenshots.
 
Typical firefox development cycle nowadays: break plugin, discover problem which had been solved by plugin years ago, solve problem in-browser.
 
Remember "this site works best in {IE|Netscape|whatever}" from years ago? Guess we're going back to it.
 
Google needs to stop this kind of thing on multiple levels. Firefox, if nothing else, is about openness and existing standards. Google should not be messing with things on their end causing one experience for Chrome users and another for either everyone else in general / Firefox specifically. Likewise, developers should be sure to test their sites for at least Chrome and Firefox, with preferably several other browsers. Firefox shouldn't have to spoof its user agent in order to get the "good' version of a webpage and frankly this is nothing new. Developers not being as standards-compliant or testing their site is one thing and at least ostensibly can be a relatively easy fix (assuming you have a site dev who is willing to make the changes when they're aware of the problem. Protip: Firefox even has a Developer's Edition with built in tools to make this and many other things easy! https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ ), but Google using their billions and marketshare to essentially get a few punches below the belt while paying lip service to standards is a bigger issue.

There seems to be a history of this in Google where at some times they'll actually implement or at least appear to use various standards and then somewhat quietly switch things so that something is proprietary or specific to their service. GoogleTalk was a good example of this for instance, at one time when it was "the" messenger service for Google and it was fully XMPP compatible. Then they messed with it to change the underlying standards and it became separate, and further diluted when they started pushing all their various messengers. The Chrome Apps/Chrome Store was another thing - I couldn't tell you how frustrating it was to see "Oh there's a PC version of X....but oh wait, it requires you to have Chrome installed and piggybacks upon it etc.." . Android is to some extent in a similar place, where the Android Open Source Program (AOSP) is thankfully still the core of each revision, but more and more of the functionality is being split offff into proprietary apps that have additional features, where the AOSP variants are more barebones compared to when they used to be identical in all but branding a few versions ago! This is a reason their recent trial of FuchsiaOS - even though its open source for now - is a major concern; it is not Linux based and instead is "Google" top to bottom even programmed in their DART language, so while it may be open for now, there won't be any GNU / Linux toolkits GPL to fall back upon if they decide to shift over to something more closed some day.

Firefox spoofing is a short term work around and works to provide evidence of this foul up but frankly it cannot be relied upon long term. Rather, it should be used to shame Google with an "I see what you did there" and remind devs to test their sites and stick to good, standards compliant design. Otherwise, more and more metrics (which are often dominated by Google, Amazon and other big data giants) will just appear "Hey look, there are a lot of chrome users out there!" and then we'll have endless stories from the blogosphere "journalists" about firefox losing market share and other nonsense. Fix this ASAP!
 
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UA parsing has always been "ugh" worthy in general. I want to send "AssMonkey 23.0" and nothing else as my UA.

If you don't understand the UA string... SEND THE REAL PAGE. If that scares you, add a link to a crippled but compatible version the user could select if they want.
 
bigdogchris said:
The problem is dumbass developers that let their personal preferences dictate what browsers they test against their sites. If they personally use Chrome, they only develop their sites for Chrome and leave everyone else out. "Upgrade to Chrome" is their fix. No, you build your site to be compatible with the majority of web browsers, which is Chrome, Firefox, IE 11, Edge, Opera, and Safari.
Click to expand...
Not necessarily, I personally use Firefox but do most of my testing against Chrome. Once upon a time I tested in all browsers, including Opera, but these days "works like Chrome" seems to be the new web-standard. I just now gave my website a spin on Firefox, and with me doing nothing Firefox 61 seems to be working fine, older versions had issues but they're gone. Mind, my site is primarily developed for iPads, and AFAIK there's no other web rendering engines on iPad than the one used in Safari, so I can get away with ignoring Firefox.

IE11 is more of a headache, though, as it's falling way behind on web-standars and doesn't fix itself by just waiting.
 
NoOther said:
This is actually a not uncommon problem among the various browsers. Typically the issue lies in code not having the proper designation for the newest versions of browsers and therefore defaulting to older versions or straight out breaking. I have had to spoof browser codes in dev environments before because of poorly written code.
Click to expand...

Although true (browser prefixes, etc.), this is actually a result of Google enhancing the experience for detected versions of their browser.

Try it, it's obvious on Android. Do a Google image search in Chrome and in Firefox. The Google version is more fluent, has animations, and gives better versions of the images. It's like this across all of Google searches (search movie show times and see how the data is presented). I'd expect it for some of their GApps, since those have a deeper relation with the Chrome browser, but not standard run of the mill search queries.

The Firefox browser may very well be capable of handling all of the advanced stuff, it's just not given the chance because it gets turned off for that user-agent.
 
anss123 said:
IE11 is more of a headache, though, as it's falling way behind on web-standars and doesn't fix itself by just waiting.
Click to expand...

Well, of course it is, it's deprecated.

Edge is pretty good at standard support these days, although the javascript performance is still abysmal.
 
I once had to parse this, instead of something sensible.

Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; Microsoft; Lumia 640 LTE) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537
 
I’ve nothing to add other than a anecdote of years ago spoofing Opera as Firefox for the purpose of watching Netflix (fuckin Microsoft Silverlight bullshit)

So yeah spoofing makes sense since some sites do shitty practices for different browsers.
 
jardows said:
Maybe it would help if there was a standard for web page development? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

It would if the standards were better, in addition to browsers being better at implementing them. The problem is that there's often leeway for interpretation on some things, and also that there are cases where values are not mandatory, but the defaults are not specified if the designer leaves them out. If the standards were more strict, that'd help a lot. Still wouldn't fix things because companies would have to follow them, but it would help.
 
Firefox is my go to browser, as been nearly since the 1st release and I dont see myself switching.
I wasn't even aware that firefox on my phone didnt get the same webpage as chrome.
Can't say that I browse a lot on my phone since most of the time I tether to a win10 laptop/tablet 2 in 1.

If it can improve my experience I am all for it but somehow I think google will react to this.
 
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Shit like this is why I prefer clean, spare, cut down code.

I have a friend who's an absolute clean-code Nazi, and totally insufferable about it. But God damn it! He's right

Sure, you don't get to play with a bunch of nifty, resource-devouring bullshit.

SO THE FUCK WHAT?
 
1_rick said:
Well, of course it is, it's deprecated.

Edge is pretty good at standard support these days, although the javascript performance is still abysmal.
Click to expand...


a year since Windows 10 actually came out, We dropped development in IE as well. On our side though js is quite fast if not on par with chrome, most of the time it's a standard's thing that hasn't been implemented in edge, but to be fair, We rarely encounter this. (usually in a input form from what I remember)
 
My Chrome Developer Edition browser just updated and now... it looks like Firefox. Round tabs, round address/URL bar, I honestly don't know what the fuck is going on anymore.
 
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