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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

#241

Post by sangnoir »

stephenr wrote: post #234
jedahan wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

On the server-side, parsing the UA string is the best & fastest way to figure out which browser is on the other end or the connection. This can need to happen before you load any JS - this is commonly used to decide which JS bundles to load. When put under the microscope, browser have inconsistent behaviors and occasional regressions from version to version (e.g. performance with sparse arrays)

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

#242

Post by QuinnyPig »

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...

Fortunately, the issue was reported in the proper / only place to get support from Google: the front page of Hacker News.

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

#243

Post by jefftk »

acdha wrote: post #196
forward1 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari

FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on Safari, but they were slower and flakier.

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

#244

Post by rtsil »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #242
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...

Fortunately, the issue was reported in the proper / only place to get support from Google: the front page of Hacker News.

Thank god for procrastination!

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

#245

Post by acdha »

jefftk wrote: post #243
acdha wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on Safari, but they were slower and flakier.

So I guess my question would be where things were breaking down - Meet was almost unusable in Firefox for 2019-2021 (Slack, Teams, Zoom, Chime, and WebEx were all fine), and the GCP console login would periodically get into a login redirect loop only in Firefox on a regular basis for months. Our GCP rep never could get an answer on whether anyone was even aware of that problem.

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

#246

Post by jefftk »

acdha wrote: post #245
jefftk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on Safari, but they were slower and flakier.

So I guess my question would be where things were breaking down - Meet was almost unusable in Firefox for 2019-2021 (Slack, Teams, Zoom, Chime, and WebEx were all fine), and the GCP console login would periodically get into a login redirect loop only in Firefox on a regular basis for months. Our GCP rep never could get an answer on whether anyone was even aware of that problem.

My guess is those paths didn't have automated tests, or the automated tests missed some important aspect of real-world usage? Issues engineers working on the product ran into were way more likely to get fixed (among other things because reproducing the issue was easier) and almost all engineers primarily used Chrome.

(Not defending; trying to give background.)

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

#247

Post by rixthefox »

forward1 wrote: post #204
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.

> 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.

This is the wrong assumption to make. I can tell you as someone with a powerful rig that is by no stretch a "slouch" sitting at 0% CPU and 0% GPU I have seen Youtube act like garbage for absolutely no reason. I've even had video playback skip ahead a second as well and it throws me off when watching videos.

> Get a faster computer

or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B" group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It only means Google is artificially putting their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with people handwaving issues with "get a better computer" Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has this issue, any other video platform does not do this so why is it only Youtube?

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

#248

Post by mrguyorama »

forward1 wrote: post #210
Y_Y wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I ask you to carefully consider that responsibility in the hands of government bureaucrats, which are generally of low skill and intelligence,

Bro you have posted this on an article where GOOGLE fucked up PARSING A USER AGENT STRING to the point they deliver an empty HTML document. What feature on the Google search page even NEEDS such feature switching based on user agent? Google search worked pretty well on internet explorer 4 for heavens sake

But please, keep telling me how private sector is so much less incompetent than the public sector

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

#249

Post by mrguyorama »

kevincox wrote: post #215
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).

I genuinely want to see a root cause blog post for this.

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

#250

Post by forward1 »

adamryman wrote: post #201
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?

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.

Firefox share declined because the market objectively decided Chrome is a better browser. Framing it as Chrome "picking" on Firefox is just silly. And I say this as a die-hard Firefox user and fan.
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