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by chrismorgan 953 days ago
> Gmail works best on Chrome.

Is this true, and if so, in what way?

> Google Docs uses cutting-edge features first (or only) found on Chrome.

Such as?

(I haven’t been a Google user for over six years, but back then neither of these were true, to my knowledge—if anything, Gmail worked better on Firefox due to significantly lower resource usage—and I can’t imagine what could have changed. Google Meet I’d understand, working properly depends on I think it’s WebRTC stuff Firefox still hadn’t shipped last I heard, but nothing that would be relevant for Gmail or Google Docs leaps out at me.)

I know I’ve heard at times of Google doing inappropriate user-agent sniffing and sending a degraded experience unless your browser claims to be Chromium, but I don’t think that’s reasonable grounds for saying it works best on Chrome, when it’s deliberate/malicious (organisational malice even if no other form) and works just fine in other browsers if they just pretend to be Chromium in their UA string.

Google has pestered and bullied and underhandedly bundled people into installing Chrome, but through most of the time they’ve made any claims about it, they’ve simply been lies, plain and simple. (Most commonly, they made a claim that was true at first, but were still making the same claim years later when it was no longer true but rather the converse in some cases.)

1 comments

> > Gmail works best on Chrome.

> Is this true, and if so, in what way?

I don't know about Gmail, but Google Translate won't let me use speech functionality in Firefox.

Tangential: Microsoft Teams mostly works in Firefox, but they have some arbitrary limitations: I can't call someone via Teams or pick up the phone if someone calls me via Teams. But I can make a video conference with someone who isn't at work, and the person I need to speak to. Or just use the iPhone app.

I'd expect similar things to be "broken by design" in Gmail.

> I don't know about Gmail, but Google Translate won't let me use speech functionality in Firefox.

Speech output works fine here (Firefox, Ubuntu 23.04). I remember needing to install some kind of system speech synthesis feature on my OS to get web speech to work, though, because Firefox doesn't have one of their own like Chrome.

As for speech input: Firefox doesn't implement the recognition part of the Web Speech API (demo here https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/web-speech-api/speech-col...). In fact, every implementation is one with a browser prefix (https://caniuse.com/speech-recognition) so it's no wonder Firefox isn't supported yet.

As for Teams: Microsoft doesn't care about the 3% Firefox users they get and they simply don't test, that's my conclusion. Back when Teams simply threw up a "your browser is not supported" the whole thing worked 95% if you spoofed the user agent and the modifications to fix the rest weren't all that hard (Firefox has some audio input/output implementation differences).