1491965 - For random Google searches, I cannot easily search for images anymore

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 975444

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P3)

Description

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Attachment: Screenshot_20180917-224746.png

If I'm not mistaken, with the old search experience that Google gave us on Android, at the top of the screen I could always choose between All, Images and More, which in turn allowed selecting Videos, News, Shopping, Maps, Books or Even More (exact spellings might vary, since I'm back-translating here).

With the new search experience that has started rolling out in the last few days, the list of search types now seems to be determined dynamically, but unlike the Tier 1 search on Chrome the list cannot be scrolled, so I'm stuck with whatever other three things Google has decided I might want to do.

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Although as a workaround, right now any of the other search options (i.e. in the attached screenshot Shopping, News or Video) still features the old design of All, <current special search> and More, from which I can then access whatever options were missing from the main page. It's still a step backwards in usability, even if the design superficially looks more like the Tier 1 search page.

Comment 2

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Thanks Jan, I'll try to see if I can get someone at Google to let us know if this is expected (but weird?) or a bug.

Comment 3

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

The weird thing is that when a search query returns some inline image search results, those often (always?) *can* be scrolled horizontally to reveal more image results than fit within the width of the page. So why they didn't do the same thing for the navigation bar at the top is beyond me...

Comment 4

[u428464]

In fact Google never served Firefox the top tier version of Google(same problem with Focus geckoview FWIW), but only a slight redesign of the previous "firefox" version to better match Chrome's version. In fact compared to blink/webkit version Google misses the following things in Firefox :
-the hamburger menu
-search options
-some menu items (4 displayed instead of 8)
-infinite scroll
As Jan said all other categories than search still displayed the old visual design. It is especially jarring on Google images.
For now UA spoof still seems to be the optimal way to have a complete Google search experience on mobile.

Comment 5

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

For anything that's not a plain web search the situation has remained unchanged, but for web searches I'm now seeing something approaching the full UI with the complete gamut of search types [1], and also including the "Search tools". Funnily enough, the latter actually have a small visual bug in the Chrome version that I'm not seeing in the page sent to Firefox.

[1] Well almost - "Flights" is missing, but that seems to be a general issue and not specific to the search query.

Comment 6

[u428464]

(In reply to Jan Henning [:JanH] from comment #5)
> For anything that's not a plain web search the situation has remained
> unchanged, but for web searches I'm now seeing something approaching the
> full UI with the complete gamut of search types [1], and also including the
> "Search tools". Funnily enough, the latter actually have a small visual bug
> in the Chrome version that I'm not seeing in the page sent to Firefox.
> 
> [1] Well almost - "Flights" is missing, but that seems to be a general issue
> and not specific to the search query.

Yes I noticed that yesterday. Very nice to be able to use search tools (especially search by date). Let's hope Google gradually roll the "modern" UI to other search options.

Comment 7

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Do we need this specific bug?
It seems to me that this is a duplicate of Bug 975444

There's nothing specifically actionable on this one from the webcompat side of things.
We have been discussing with Google for a long time and some progress are being made.