It's similar speeds though I've got 4G or good Wifi.
But what you miss out on is the top cards.
Like if you search for Weather, you can see what's the predicted forecast per hour.
Or when you search for translate, you get a translate widget at the top.
And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.
Is it possible they rolled out a "Chrome" and an "everyone else" option since some options like cards are only tested by Google on Chrome, and that's why it shows up as such?
Well they give the chrome site to Safari on iPhone OS.
So possibly but this is the company that is all about web standards, right?
At least I'm sure that what someone working on Chromium/Chrome/Angular/etc would say.
Safari and Chrome are using the same basic webkit rendering engine with minimal mutations from each other.
Firefox's engine is different and makes many different decisions with regards to implementation detail. Since the web standards rarely constrain things like, say, time to complete a reflow step in mutating a page when a DOM element has its visibility property changed, standards-compliant browsers can make different decisions on these bits of detail that lead to practically very different experiences.
In general, if it works on Chrome it'll probably work on Safari, and it is not guaranteed to work on Firefox, IE, or Edge without further testing.
Obvious problems goes unnoticed: search results page kept burning cpu if I keet it open in desktop Firefox. (Installed an extension to fix it and haven't tested lately.)
It's hard to belive this can happen without anyone caring at such a big place.
At a company that seems to be attracting the best and brightest it is really hard to belive this isn't intentional.
So now assume they test and find it doesn't work on mobile Firefox. What should they do? Refrain from rolling out the design to Chrome and Safari until Firefox performance catches up, or roll out the functionality differently on different browsers?
Sounds like, based on the descriptions here, they're doing the latter, right? Infinite scrolling on Chrome vs. paged viewing on Firefox, for instance.
Maybe FF just isn't a very good browser? You can be standards-compliant while implementing the standards with performance problems and ugly corner-cases.
I say they are applying an Microsoft vs Opera here and I wish EU will take a closer look at them soon.
IMO basic cross-browser compability is something that everyone but the most cash-strapped or pre-beta software should apply for as long as it is publicly available at least.
And for google who earns more than they know what do do with I'd say it is an embarrassingly easy-to-see-through anti-competitive behaviour.
And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.