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www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

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Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#191

Post by kevincox »

aragilar wrote: post #23
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unlikely they'd want to sabotage Firefox. Google is Firefox' primary source of income, and Firefox is strategically crucial token competition that stands between Google and an antitrust lawsuit of the sort Microsoft faced in the early 2000s (where Microsoft were basically a technicality away from being broken up).

It does seem unlikely, but playing with the example UA in curl (as noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38925015 ) seems to show it's the combination of "Android" and "Firefox" that causes this behaviour. I wonder if any other mobile browsers are broken?

A far more likely explanation is simply that two features or workarounds are enabled, maybe "Android" triggers a prompt to install Chrome or something and "Firefox" triggers some workaround code. However these interact poorly and cause a crash.

If they wanted to sabotage Firefox I doubt they would choose to send a blank page. They would probably send infinite captchas or just disable most features (which they already do).

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#192

Post by wharvle »

kevincox wrote: post #185
wharvle wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years and years ago I'd configure this stuff in FF, but using DDG effectively auto-configures it for any browser, exactly the same, everywhere, all I have to do is set the default search engine. And it includes some that I do use but probably wouldn't have bothered to configure on my own.

Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted and will sync your keyword bookmarks across all of your devices. Sure, you have to set them up but it seems worth it to get the ones that work for me, not whatever duck duck go thinks is popular.

I've never wanted one and not found it in DDG, or found it named differently from what I'd have named it. Every now and then I try to guess one blind, and I don't think I've ever had it surprise me. And it works in any browser.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#193

Post by kevindamm »

mook wrote: post #184
shadowgovt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile. Why? They don't have UI tests for Opera on the Nintendo Wii either, and at this point I bet the install base for Wii-Opera is still larger than the install base for FF mobile. TBH, when I was there it surprised me that Google didn't have a dedicated hardware test-bench room with rows upon rows of browser deployments that every UI change need…

> Next update will be within 12 hours. (From the status page linked above.) That sounds pretty far from being nimble and deploying rapidly. Not really a knock on the people doing the work — doing stuff in high stress sucks. But it's clear that they're intentionally deprioritizing a competitor.

Only way to really test that is to break search for chrome and see how long that takes to rollback.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#194

Post by ziddoap »

ravenstine wrote: post #121
awicz wrote: post #85

kagi.com

I know that jumping in to mention Kagi has become a meme on HN, but I do think it's important to keep encouraging people to move away from Google. The specific search engine barely even matters, as much as I like Kagi. The only way that any of these search engines are going to improve is if more people leave Google in the dust. If people don't want to pay for Kagi, then use Brave Search. DuckDuckGo was really gone do…

>DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.

I've seen this a lot lately, but no one has said why.

I solely use DDG and have done so for a long time. I have not noticed any specific changes, nor any degradation in my search results. I don't pay much attention to announcements or anything, so maybe I missed something?

Can you or someone please tell me how/why DDG is suddenly not recommended and "gone downhill"?

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#195

Post by sleepybrett »

forward1 wrote: post #188
phreack wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's discussed on GP's link, a former Firefox vice president said > "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every…

This is a baseless accusation which defies logic. Chrome has 65.76% of the browser market share. Firefox has 2.93% of the browser market share, and of those, only some Android users were affected. And you're saying Google purposefully contrived a situation to break their own service to get those Or is it possible no one cares about Firefox because so few people use it and this is the result of a simple bug?

Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade. It's even broken for me, a user on macos using firefox without an ad-blocker enabled for youtube in premium mode. The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'. Videos play fine but often when trying to scrub with the timeline the timeline thumbnail will not respond or other controls will be very sluggish.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#196

Post by acdha »

forward1 wrote: post #175
WhackyIdeas wrote: post #161

This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357

Is that what you think happened here? Google made the search page blank for Firefox users to get them on Chrome? Or perhaps it's the work of Hanlon's razor.

I don’t think there’s an official “sabotage Firefox” memo waiting to be subpoenaed. I think it’s more along the lines of Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari, figuring that they save money and, probably never written down, any problems just make their browser look better.

This keeps happening over and over for Google at a rate far in excess of other major tech companies so we know they don’t make an effort to test with Firefox, and it’s why I’d like regulators to force anyone making a browser used by more than, say, 100k people to be obligated to test in other browsers on every site their larger organization operates and have a maximum time to patch any compatibility or performance issue which isn’t due to a browser not implementing a W3C standard. The goal would be to cover things like YouTube using the Chrome web component API for ages after the standard shipped and serving a slow polyfill to non-Chrome browsers.

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#198

Post by ravenstine »

sumeno wrote: post #156
ravenstine wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily everywhere, or at least not quite as bad as you're suggesting, in my experience. I used to advocate for DDG, but they've gone so far downhill that I rarely waste my time with it. They've decided to go PG-rated everywhere even if you have safe search turned off. This is a problem because, even if they just want to block porn or illegal things, this can have an impact on legitimate academic research. An…

> Kagi (which relies on Brave Search instead of Bing) This is misleading. Kagi uses multiple external sources including Google and Brave as well as their own internal indexes https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Ah, I was under the impression it was almost entirely the same as Brave. Thanks!

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#199

Post by WhackyIdeas »

forward1 wrote: post #175
WhackyIdeas wrote: post #161

This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357

Is that what you think happened here? Google made the search page blank for Firefox users to get them on Chrome? Or perhaps it's the work of Hanlon's razor.

Considering it has happened time and time again, and this latest one happens just by changing the UA… yes.

If it looks like a banana, shaped like a banana, feels like a banana, it’s probably a banana (or a plantain).

Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

#200

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

theshrike79 wrote: post #172
the_snooze wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bing DDG works well enough for me to be my daily driver, but it's absolute garbage for any kind of news search. Bing prioritizes MSN repost spam from dubious sources, so I'm better off going just directly to news sites I trust.

I must be weird, because I very rarely search for news. I just go to the sites I trust. I think the only time I search for news (usually on Google) is to find a reliable article about a celebrity death.

You can actually find this rather rapidly through Wikipedia.

In fact, you can identify the exact moment when the news about the death leaked, when the first editor adds it to the article. Generally, experienced editors will keep it out until a reliable source is provided, which typically happens quite quickly.

In fact I've found out about a number of celebrity deaths, just by having them on my watchlist.

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