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

#201

Post by adamryman »

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?

Firefox had 30% market share in 2011, the article links to the discussion about when google chrome first released. The article discusses how this behavior ate away at the market share every time google released something that worked on google chrome, and broken on firefox. And as a result over the years, now firefox has a 3% market share as you say.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by Draiken »

forward1 wrote: post #173
Draiken wrote: post #93

Another reason to stop using Google. Don't waste the opportunity! Switched to DDG ages ago, and even though it's not amazing, it's already better than Google. Although, if we're honest, searching these days is absolutely atrocious everywhere. Any keyword search will only net you ads or "top X" articles full of SEO garbage most likely written by AI at this point...

How is DDG "better" than Google? In my experience it serves almost identical results. And it's now served from Microsoft servers, so the argument "it's more private" doesn't really hold water anymore.

They don't break their site for Firefox users for starters :)

I do say this as somewhat of a joke, but that's for me a real reason. It's not the first time Google has intentionally screwed over Firefox users.

Even if we believe what they say every time it happens: it's "just a bug". For me it clearly signals they simply don't care. And that's the best case scenario. Worst case they're abusing their market position to drive out competition.

Even if DDG serves requests from MS servers, that's not even close to opting into the Google surveillance machine.

Finally, if what you said holds true about serving basically the same content, then the hostility against Firefox and the fact that you won't be helping this monopoly should already make it "better".

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

#204

Post by forward1 »

sleepybrett wrote: post #195
forward1 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade.

I use Youtube in Firefox daily, even in Strict mode with many user.js tweaks, and have never had a problem.

> The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'.

Get a faster computer.

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

#205

Post by KirinDave »

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.

For one, that "deprioritize a competitor" is not clear at all. Why would that be so? Isn't it far more likely, given the rarity of these events, that a test regression occurred or some other subtle issue rather than assumed malfeasance?

For two, that "next update in 12 hours" is user comms. For me, at least, google.com works fine both on curl and my browser. That's a fairly normal cadence for big companies.

On the larger point about "nimble and deploying rapidly", the people who generally brag about "being nimble and deploying rapidly" almost never serve an even 1/100th the audience the size of Google.com does, and it's really questionable if, at that scale, you actually want to risk global regressions even on trivial bugs.

So I don't know what that user is talking about, and I agree with you that they are obviously not that.

That approach may be antithetical to the modern startup engineer frantic to prove their stock's hypothetical worth to their investors, unconcerned about trivial revenue loss from frontpage issues because of whatever latest node.js drama nuked their continuously deployed website. But the fact that "the landing search page is broken for 1% of users in a rare but public use case" is news at all is because Google's approach for search sets our expectations that this won't happen.

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

#206

Post by kevincox »

wharvle wrote: post #192
kevincox wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you are the perfectly average human then. I am not so lucky.

I have `s` to search sourcegraph.com, DDG has !sg. `t` to use Google Translate, DDG has !gt, `i` to search IMDB, DDG has !imd or !imdb, v to search animated images, DDG has !gif, `ni` to search nixpkgs issues which DDG doesn't have (although they do have one for the nix repo at !nr which is pretty impressive. I use `nc` for this). Not to mention personalized shortcuts like searching my company's GitHub organization or JIRA tickets that would never be a public bang, much less have a 2 character shortcut.

I stopped there but it is clear to me that I benefit from making my own short aliases for the searches that I use most. Plus it is nice to not send my logs to a third party and get improved performance.

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

#207

Post by KirinDave »

shadowgovt wrote: post #150
egeozcan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's been a while since it's broken? url-bar search works so this seem to only happen if you navigate to google.com directly. How many people navigate to google to search, while using firefox on android? Just a hunch though. OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile.

> 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…

Google's strategy for search ux is decidedly not "nimble and rapid" and I don't understand why anyone with first hand knowledge would ever suggest that.

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

#208

Post by close04 »

oblio wrote: post #71
close04 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strategy heads come up with the strategy - friction. Enough friction against Firefox will let the browser still exist (essential for the claim that there is competition) but without actually being able to compete. Middle management finds a tactic that implements the friction strategy - small "random" breaks and persistent performance issues. An engineer would find the precise measure to implement - break the UA strin…

> Middle management finds a tactic that implements the friction strategy - small "random" breaks and persistent performance issues. > An engineer would find the precise measure to implement - break the UA string sniffing targeting a specific browser. You got the strategy right but the implementation is laughable, sorry :-))) The implementation is: "We have a budget of N story points this sprint to resolve bugs, let's…

The aim was to lay out at which level each stage happens. It's not middle management taking a random decision. The fish rots from the head but the tail certainly doesn't smell rosy either. Dieselgate was also just a random deprioritized code bug until it wasn't.

Repeated incompetence from one level is actual maliciousness from the level above, all the way to the top.

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

#209

Post by ravenstine »

ziddoap wrote: post #194
ravenstine wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

In one of the comments I made elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my experience with DDG is that it's become extremely "PG-rated" even if you turn off safe search. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but to me it's pretty clear to me that DDG is way more normie-safe than when I began using it several years ago. DDG shows me more of what I consider detritus than Kagi does. It's extremely bad at finding any results by exact text, but to be fair, every search engine is bad at this now. And finally, DDG hasn't had what I would consider to be worthwhile feature improvements in a very long time. The doodads that sometimes show up when you use a particular term like "qr code hello world" are neat, but ultimately not that beneficial in contrast to being given more control over the results themselves. Their other features are mostly things that have been solved many times over.

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

#210

Post by forward1 »

Y_Y wrote: post #190
forward1 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fined by whom? On what authority? It's fascinating how people clamor for more government regulation and control at the first sign of trouble, without reasoning about the implications of those things, despite a history replete with examples of power abuse from the same.

By the government of any country in which Google has a presence? Are you really fascinated by people desiring regulation? Are you confident that history has more examples of the harm of regulation than the harm of its absence?

Government authority is not absolute: it must derive power from some law or other legal basis, which does not presently exist for "websites [which] break in competitor's browser". And if you are suggesting creating precedence for it, I ask you to carefully consider that responsibility in the hands of government bureaucrats, which are generally of low skill and intelligence, and are potent to abuse it.
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