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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

#211

Post by shadowgovt »

KirinDave wrote: post #207
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…

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.

It is gated on a lot of things, especially relative to early days of the company. It's just that browser compatibility isn't generally one of those things... They still handle that by the belief they can roll back quickly.

Relatively speaking, you can still undo the change to the front page faster than you can, say, roll out a new version of a desktop application, especially if the change fixes an active fire.

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

#212

Post by temp0826 »

bigbillheck wrote: post #103
Uptrenda wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A bit of searching suggests that this individual is the same 'robertsdotpm' who posted that "b-bazinga" comment, or at least is closely associated with them.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Googlers? Obviously scummy behavior should be highlighted.

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

#213

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Nimble is on the order of a week, not on the order of hours at their scale.

But it's also not on the order of quarters, is what I mean.

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

#214

Post by ptek »

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.

If it is a old video (3 days), just search for it in DDG, and just watch it via DDG.

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

#215

Post by kevincox »

soraminazuki wrote: post #109

Why would Google return an empty page based on any UA string? This is such a bizarre bug.

I would bet that the backend crashed.

Probably the backend sent the initial headers and start of the response to the load balancer, then stared rendering the page and crashed. Presumably `` is hardcoded as it is always sent for HTML pages and maybe fills up one of the initial packets or something. The rest of the page may be rendered and return as separate chunks (or just one large content chunk).

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

#217

Post by kevincox »

oh_sigh wrote: post #120
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #99

The latest comment on the issue states that Mozilla has a patch that can be emergency-deployed as a patch release. The proposed patch literally overrides the UA string for Google. Is it just me, or is this absolutely insane? When Google ships a bug, it's suddenly the responsibility of browser vendors to "fix" it at the browser level?

It's not the responsibility of the browser vendors. But they have an interest in un-breaking the experience for their users. In a sense, Google is too big to fail, so users want it to work any way possible. It happens all the time, you probably just don't realize it. There is special code in Windows for supporting/un-breaking popular applications, same with Android and iOS.

Yup, it is unfortunately very common. Open `about:compat` in Firefox to see all of the cases where they work around site issues. Right now I count 32 user-agent overrides, 38 "Interventions" and 49 "SmartBlock Fixes".

IIUC "Interventions" are typically injected scripts or styles and "SmartBlock Fixes" are exceptions to tracker blocking.

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

#218

Post by rcxdude »

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?

This is about a pattern of behaviour that started when Chrome launched (and had less market share than Firefox) and has continued since then. This isn't "They're trying to take our tiny market share", this is "This is how they took our quite substantial market share".

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

#219

Post by kevincox »

ravenstine wrote: post #126

The user agent header has always been a mistake. I'm not sure what companies like Google are thinking when they block features from working based on the user agent. In Firefox, I use an add-on that randomizes the user agent string, and I've configured it to use a handful of the most common user agent strings. Occasionally, parts of YouTube will break because of a certain user agent configured, like chats or chat repl…

I don't think this is true. Having the user agent is incredibly useful when debugging an issue. It can even be useful for deploying workarounds.

For example if you see that errors are being thrown on your site and nearly all of them are the new release of Chrome then you can quickly narrow down it being a compatibility issue with the new version. Similarly if someone is making broken requests to your site at a high rate it may help you figure out who it is and contact them.

It can even be useful in automated use cases. If Firefox 27 has a bug it is reasonable to add very specific checks to work around it gracefully. When possible feature detection is better, but some bugs can be very hard to test for.

The problem comes from:

1. People whitelisting user agents.

2. Adding wide sweeping checks, especially if you don't constantly re-evaluate them (For example Brave versions later than 32)

In this case it seems that it is hard to actually conclude that a user-agent check was bad here. Google could have been trying to serve something that would work better on Firefox (maybe it worked around a bug). Of course that code crashed and burned, but that doesn't mean that the check was a bad idea.

I agree that user-agents are often used for evil, but they can also be used for good. It is hard to justify completely removing them. With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately lots of people aren't responsible.

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

#220

Post by forward1 »

rcxdude wrote: post #218
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?

This is about a pattern of behaviour that started when Chrome launched (and had less market share than Firefox) and has continued since then. This isn't "They're trying to take our tiny market share", this is "This is how they took our quite substantial market share".

If they already took substantial market share, why would they need tofurther break Firefox users' experience? You just made my point for me.
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