Google Desktop Search needs better browser support

Google application’s support for Operating Systems and Browsers is really scaring me. Almost all of Google’s applications are Windows only. Many of them just work on Win2000 and above. Many users are still on Windows 98! GMail took sometime before it started supporting Safari on Mac. Now with the new release of Google Desktop Search, lack of support for alternate browsers is coming back into review once again.

One of the good things to happen in the recent times is that Google has started to realize Mozilla Firefox as a major browser. We see instances proving it everywhere. GMail supported Firefox from day one and most help pages of Google Desktop Search indicate that Firefox support is on the way. Even Blogger users got messages recommending Firefox over Internet Explorer. Currently, Firefox users can just use the browser for processing Desktop Searches. But browsing sessions from Firefox are not monitored. So, any website surfed in Firefox will not be indexed by the Google Desktop Search crawlers. A future update is expected to take care of that.

However, users of the third most popular web browser (after IE and Mozilla variants) are totally blocked out. Opera has a small but very faithful user base who continues to use Opera in spite of it being not totally free. Google does not let the Opera users to even use the desktop search unless they do browser spoofing and identify Opera as Internet Explorer 6.

What Google needs to do is to start supporting more non-Microsoft applications. Especially when it comes to browsers and mail clients. Considering many people are now exploring alternate options due to the massive security problems, vastly used Internet Explorer and Outlook Express suffer from. Firefox and Opera users might not make the majority, but with time, the number is only going to increase. Starting to support Mac and Linux would not hurt as well!

Afterthought: Google indexes any html page found on the system. So, if the browser cache is stored in html format, it would still be accessible from Google Desktop Search. So, there are in fact some consolations.