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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

A couple things bothering me so far...

1. It's 2011, and I started out by seeing this:

https://plus.google.com/not-supported/?ref=/up/

I had to "lie" to Google and pretend I'm Safari. No big deal, but Google of all sites should not have these kinds of crap restrictions.

2. When I tried to log in, I was spammed that I should "link to Picasa", whatever that means, with the only options being to do it or Cancel (at which point the entire Google login is stopped!).

So far, from my point of view Google+ is making basic mistakes: I am discouraged in every way to log in.

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What browser are you using, out of curiosity? Presumably something based on WebKit if you're claiming to be Safari.

Yes...using OmniWeb (Mac). But I noticed Opera isn't on their list either.

Opera has how much market share?

G+ is javascript heavy, I wouldn't want to support every browser under the sun either.

And user-agent sniffing (guessing from the 'lying to be safari' comment) is the right way to go here? Really?

If you don't want to support 'every browser under the sun' and really think that looking at the user-agent is a good idea (It's not..): Show a small notice that the experience might be degraded. Politely. And still serve your content to the user that is interested in what you have to offer.

Opera's market share? Uhm... Are we ignoring the mobile market or not for this (useless) sidetrack question?

On a product that deals with social networking, no experience is better than a bad experience.

They show a small notice when you access it via a direct link to a public post.

And they definitely use some useragent white-listing. Feels like 2004 again.

User-agent sniffing or not, Plus still works on Opera Mobile under Android, no notices. So, the mobile market is irrelevent.

And then you have to deal with user who missed or didn't care about the notice.

And no, it doesn't matter how many engineers you throw at it. If an engineering hour can be used to make more money elsewhere it should be.

Frankly I wouldn't have cared about Safari on the nonmobile website.

But that is just me.

There is a difference between ensuring 100% support in major browsers, and applying a white list to usable browsers. Most of those small-time browsers are built on webkit, gecko or prestro anyway; so they shouldn't have any serious deviation of behaviour from the major browsers. Then you also have to consider javascript being a standard means most features should work on any browser that impelments the standard.

If Google's serious about competing they shouldn't set up roadblocks that their biggest competitor, Facebook, doesn't have. And even if Facebook didn't exist, Google's trying to make a site that thrives on user information so it makes no sense to create barriers when users come along.

Maybe a small web site doesn't have to support every browser, but Google has the resources to test anything they want. Besides, Opera and WebKit-based browsers are really good and aren't likely to show many new bugs.

Google probably figures that the kind of people who run Opera are the type who know to use other browsers or switch their user-agent strings :).

It's not on their list, but they're not treating it the same way as OmniWeb either (at least they didn't when I signed up in July).

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