Recently, Google launched a new service called Inbox. It's basically Gmail re-invented with a different UI and UX. It's a good tool which improved my ability to keep a zero email inbox. I'm currently using the Android application of Inbox and not at all on the desktop, since it's not available for Firefox, my default browser. This requires me to open up Inbox in Google Chrome if I want to see it. Opening up Inbox in Firefox gives the following message:
But, I couldn't understand why it's only available in Google Chrome so I started investigating on why it's so.
First thing I tried, is to switch the user agent from Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0 (Firefox default user agent for me on Ubuntu Linux) to my Google Chromes user agent instead Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36
This is what I see now:
This got rid of the message when loading the page, but the application didn't work. I get an error in the console and the application is just loading but is not interactive because of the error. Could Google be right to be blocking the application since it didn't work in Firefox? To answer that question, I seek out to find out WHY Firefox didn't work and Google Chrome did.
Inspecting the console, we can see that the error is about CSP (Content Security Policy) which protects the browser from loading resource from other domains in order to protect the user of the browser. A quick visit to about:config and setting security.csp.enable to false brings me the following:
All right! The application is fully functional. I can do everything I can do in Google Chrome. We have some warnings and errors in the console, but the application is still fully functional. It's slow, a lot slower than Google Chrome. If this is because of Firefox is bad or if Inbox is bad, I leave as a exercise for you to figure out. Animations doesn't seem to work, could be because of webkit-specific transitions or un-implemented Firefox features but I do know, that the application actually works if you want to.
So, obviously the most painful point for Googles team working on Inbox, is to solve the CSP issue. I'm not 100% sure on how the browsers implementation differs with CSP but there is a main difference in that there seems to be no CSP protected between Google domains in Google Chrome but that's just what I see after a quick look. If someone have more knowledge about this, I would be happy to know about it.
Since I got access to Inbox, the message have been there in Firefox. Yesterday, I figured out a way to circumwent it and use my favorite browser to get access to a webpage that should work in both browsers. Ideally, it would work in most major browsers but my goal was only to have access via Firefox. For now, I'm happy in being able to access Inbox on Firefox but a bit worried since I have to disable CSP. For now, I just keep on using Inbox on my Android phone only.
However, we still haven't figured out exactly why Google is blocking Inbox on Firefox. That the application is not working, seems to not be fully true. With some more man hours, it seems trivial for Google to get the application to run in Firefox to. Maybe too much Chrome specific technologies or just a try to limit the usage of Firefox on the web?
I would love to use Inbox on my Firefox browser, too. But! CSP!? Oh that scares me when I have to disable this. Thanks for sharing this though I really appreciated it and I'd hope Google team will come out and explain the reason behind this all non-sense.