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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

#231

Post by eviks »

wharvle wrote: post #183
eviks wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better to lose the inconvenient ! and use a browser that supports prefixes in the search bar Then you can "w chemistry" to open Wikipedia with a list of suggestions from the same Wikipedia ("Chemistry (Girls Aloud album)") in the same place

Something this doesn't do that DDG bangs do, is let me append it, or even stick it in the middle of a search. I can just type it wherever my cursor happens to be, other than in the middle of a term. This comes up when I search something in DDG then change my mind and want to use a bang.

good point, and it's smart enough to ignore when quoted

Wish they also allowed changing the !prefix

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

#232

Post by shadowgovt »

chias wrote: post #230
KirinDave wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

I think the parent comment's point is: if this were affecting a version of Google-branded Chrome with similar market share, do you think we would still be getting "next update in 12 hours"? I remember an internal mantra in Google along the lines of "if you break something in production, roll back first, ask questions about how it happened later, even if you think it's a simple fix". It feels telling that this is not…

If it were Chrome, it'd never have gotten out the door because the developers writing the feature use Chrome.

> if you break something in production, roll back first, ask questions about how it happened later, even if you think it's a simple fix

I don't know that they have enough information on the breakage to know when to rollback to.

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

#233

Post by acdha »

1oooqooq wrote: post #67
rendaw wrote: post #22

Is there any legitimate use for UA string sniffing vs feature detection? And what could a search engine possibly do that's so bleeding edge it doesn't work in all browsers?

No. But you might be misguided if you are incompetent to do it right, with incremental enhancement based on available features/resources. But then you will also be incompetent to do it right with UA sniffing, which is even harder and require more maintenance to keep the list up-to-date. That's the obtuse thought process on how you get the garbage google just showed us.

This level of condescension isn’t helpful, especially as you’re wrong to make such an absolute assertion rather than describing the right or wrong reasons to use a tool.

UA sniffing should be a last resort but there have been times where browsers have claimed to support something but had hard to detect bugs and the cleanest way to handle it was to pretend the feature detection failed on those older browsers.

This is increasingly rare – the last time I had to do it was for Internet Explorer – but I would not take a bet that nobody will ever have a need for it again.

As an example, I recently had to deal with an exception to a TLS 1.2 requirement because while almost all of our traffic is from modern user agents, there was a group of blind users with braille displays using Android KitKat which defaults to only supporting a maximum of TLS 1.1 and “go buy an expensive new device” isn’t an appropriate response even though you might be entirely comfortable saying that random internet crawlers getting an error is okay.

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

#234

Post by stephenr »

jedahan wrote: post #224
dannysullivan wrote: post #216

I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...

Would love to hear what the bug and/or fix was

I'm more interested in why ua sniffing is considered acceptable for this.

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

#235

Post by Uptrenda »

dannysullivan wrote: post #216

I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...

It's ok, sure it's stressful when something like this happens. Software is a hard field and the amount of things that can go wrong is immense. When I think about how few errors and downtime some of the larger services have I realize how much work must be involved.

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

#236

Post by forward1 »

gkbrk wrote: post #229
forward1 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> why would they need tofurther break Firefox users' experience To prevent the market share from going up? That's the logical thing to do after spending millions developing and marketing your browser to the number 1 spot. Why would they waste that money and effort by playing nice now and letting the market share go back up?

Not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes users just prefer faster, better advertised, better supported software. To suggest Google is actively and wilfully interfering with <3% of browser market share is just so ridiculous, so foolish, it is actually amusing.

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

#237

Post by code_biologist »

Uptrenda wrote: post #235
dannysullivan wrote: post #216

I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It’s been fixed now and posted to our search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...

It's ok, sure it's stressful when something like this happens. Software is a hard field and the amount of things that can go wrong is immense. When I think about how few errors and downtime some of the larger services have I realize how much work must be involved.

I'd divide "things going wrong" into forced and unforced errors. Your upstream service providers sending subtly malformed data is a forced error. It happens. Doing user agent sniffing for presentation, poorly, is an unforced error.

It's not amateurish to have problems. It is amateurish (or malicious) to have problems caused by this specific class of issue.

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

#238

Post by michaelt »

forward1 wrote: post #178
lopis wrote: post #131

Given Google's size and market share, they should be fined whenever they break access to a competitor's website (e.g. Chrome update breaks access to DDG) or if their websites break in competitor's browser (e.g Google breaks on Firefox). They have more than enough resources to run automated checks on this, so it's hard to not see malice instead of incompetence in this case.

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.

Back when competition law used to be enforced, if you used your ~90% market share in one area (such as PC operating systems) to give yourself an unfair advantage in another area (such as web browsers) the government forced you to stop doing that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

If the laws were still being enforced, a company that has a very large market share in web browsers, and a very large market share in search, would have to be extremely careful not to "accidentally" break their competitors' products.

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

#240

Post by code_biologist »

ptek wrote: post #214
sleepybrett wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not a solution that will work for mom and pop. Exactly the kind of workaround that relegates Firefox to being a "techies only" browser.
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