The addon really only spoofs the UA to a Chrome one, so Firefox gets the same page that Chrome does. In other words, this should also happen if you likewise change it with another addon.

The issue is likely that Google Search’s Chrome version is now using some code that somehow hangs on Firefox, and I haven’t been able to reproduce the issue to diagnose it, sadly.

I just added a link to the firefox magazine using Fedia’s + button. Should I be doing something different? Maybe my system time is off?

Sure, but that’s after years of researching and tweaking the mitigation, and doesn’t cover other OSes. I certainly agree that some folks made it sound a lot more dire than it ever was, though.

Sometimes the hardware or software configurations of the machines running the tests changes, or a bug in the test harness itself is fixed, which can skew all of the results at once.

To be fair, given how many high-profile data breaches there have been since, and the fact that CPU performance was significantly affected, and how much Intel has struggled to remain competitive, I’m not sure we were all that far off from any exaggerations.