Exactly, no one knows, but here we are on the 7th article saying Google is slowing down Firefox on purpose. That’s the least likely option by far. That would get them into multiple anti consumer and anti monopoly lawsuits while probably breaching their contract with FF at the same time. Alphabets board of advisors isn’t run by Elon musk, they know pretty much what they can get away with and wouldn’t be stupid enough to try something this big while they are already beeing monitored by the EU.

It’s a standard timeout function without any context. Most likely thing is that it tries to load an ad and if that doesn’t work in these 5 seconds, then the anti adblock popup is displayed. If you don’t use an adblock, the site loads instantly cause the ad is detected. If you use ublock, you see neither the ad nor the popup, so everything that’s left is a 5 seconds timeout.

While it definitely is shady coding, it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.

Tbh it sounds like you didn’t search for the website, but just put the term itch.io into the search box. Special characters like a dot get completely ignored in the search, so you searched for “itch io username” which will give massively different results depending on the username.

If you search for the site properly by using site:itch.io then Google will only show you results from that site and nothing else.

Lots of complaints about the Google results often come down to user errors.

1. Google is the standard. I’d argue that more than 50% of the population doesn’t know what a browser or a search engine is. They put their question into whatever textbox they find in chrome and Google gives them their answers.

2. There are no better alternatives for the general userbase. Other search engines are better for your privacy and may give better results if you know how to use extended search parameters, but very few people even care about all that. Google is the search engine that will give you the best result if you just type in your question.