Google Adwords Does not Like Firefox Aurora (5)

It seems to me that every day Google is taking one further step towards going completely hostile towards Mozilla and Firefox.  Either that or they are indifferent to them. 

Logging into AdWords today with the latest Firefox Aurora browser (Firefox equivilant to Google Chrome Canary - near-nightly updates, some risk of instability) this is what I saw.



When did a release from 2 days ago become defined as "old"?

I got the alert message up top, which has become quite common when entering many sites with Internet Explorer 6, thanks to the campaign to kill IE6.  They must be doing some poor UA sniffing and they have not updated their code to reflect the fact that Mozilla copied Google's own release schedule for their browsers.  Being the fans of web standards that they are, Google should be using feature detection anyway. 

I hope this is just an oversite.  Hopefully it is not in conflict with "don't be evil".  You would hope that the AdWords developers would be trying the apps in all types of browsers in advance and only once they have been released.

As recently as 2008, Google was the source of 91-94% of the Mozilla Foundation's (non-profit behind firefox) funding.

When Google decided to launch Chrome instead of further bolstering Firefox, that was the biggest sign that the partnership was going in the wrong direction.  Then, when Eric Schmidt had his privacy gaffe, the Mozilla camp used the dreaded M and B words in suggesting a move away from Google.  I don't know if a partnership with Google can heal, once that has happened.

This is heading towards a sad end for what was a beautiful partnership responsible for forcing the advancement of web browser technology and web standards.  We should leave all of our browsers at half-scroll when the deal finally dies likely later this year.

At least Google does not have a long history of partnerhips turning sour

Angry Birds Web App using Firefox 5

Yesterday Google announced that it has launched Angry Birds as a web app in collaboration with Rovio and it is available in the Chrome App Store.

Now that I have been using Firefox Aurora a bit more than Chrome Canary these days, I wanted to give it a shot since a web app should work in both HTML 5 enabled (mostly) browsers.  Unfortunately, the Chrome store said that my browser does not support this web app and that I should use chrome instead.  Well, I installed the app in Chrome to see that it basically is just an app bookmark that points to a specific website chrome.angrybirds.com.

Once I saw the URL, I decided to give it a cut and paste try in Aurora (currently Firefox 5).  The rest was bird flying, pig crushing history...

Google Instant Makes Insights + Suggest Extension even more Valuable

Now that Google has turned on Google Instant (I am not a fan yet, but I could perhaps get used to it), the importance of Google Suggest has increased greatly because now they do not only give you a suggest search, but now give users suggested results.

In making this change, it is even more important that SEOs and other interested users understand and analyze the most popular searches that will be forced on suggested to users of Google Search.

The Google Suggest 4 Google Insights for Search Extension makes it easy to quickly compare and view the popularity (as well as rising/popular related searches, and regional interest) of the searches that Google is most likely to execute in the process of writing a normal query.

See the original post to learn more and download the extension (for Chrome and Firefox)