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

#251

Post by forward1 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #248
forward1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

Virtually yelling and calling me "bro" doesn't form an argument for government intervention, but it seems to help you vent, so have at it.

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

#252

Post by Horpostiated »

code_biologist wrote: post #240
ptek wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox's irrelevance is why it's regulated to techies. And sure, you're free to blame Google for some of that, but let's not pretend Mozilla has always been some wellspring of user-pleasing decision making.

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

#253

Post by mrguyorama »

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.

It's literally older than Google

Here's Raymond Chen sharing some of the worst examples from the 90s

https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec...

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

#254

Post by acdha »

jefftk wrote: post #246
acdha wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> Not defending; trying to give background

I appreciate that - it’s been really frustrating knowing how many good technical staff Google has and seeing things just not get fixed. Our GCP reps seemed resigned to this happening but didn’t feel they had leverage to get attention on the product side, which made me feel bad for them.

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

#255

Post by autoexec »

shadowgovt wrote: post #122
pwdisswordfishc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just sabotage with extra plausible deniability.

Is it "sabotage" when you don't intentionally devote resources to making some random third party's browser work? What obligation do they have? Mozilla has cachet with nerds like us because of its history. Not because it's particularly better than alternatives or because it has enough of a user base to throw its weight around. In contrast, they do test on Safari. They'd lose double-digit percentages of users if they d…

Except that firefox is particularly better than alternatives. It isn't sending my browsing history to Google, and actually lets me block ads. Firefox provides a level of customization and options to protect your privacy that chrome will never match.

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

#256

Post by shadowgovt »

autoexec wrote: post #255
shadowgovt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it "sabotage" when you don't intentionally devote resources to making some random third party's browser work? What obligation do they have? Mozilla has cachet with nerds like us because of its history. Not because it's particularly better than alternatives or because it has enough of a user base to throw its weight around. In contrast, they do test on Safari. They'd lose double-digit percentages of users if they d…

Except that firefox is particularly better than alternatives. It isn't sending my browsing history to Google, and actually lets me block ads. Firefox provides a level of customization and options to protect your privacy that chrome will never match.

> It isn't sending my browsing history to Google

For obvious reasons, I don't think Google is devoting any resources to optimizing the experience of navigating to google.com for people who don't want any history generated on their use of google.com.

I agree with you that the other features listed are positives, but they don't appear to be positive enough to push use of Firefox psst Safari, Chrome, or Edge numbers.

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

#257

Post by rstuart4133 »

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?

One notable thing about the Google search homepage is how fast it is. It's gob smackingly quick. It responds to the initial key press under in under 200ms with 10 suggestions that include text and pictures, and keeps doing it. My round trip time to www.google.com is around 20ms, so at least 100ms of that time is swallowed by the internet.

You don't get that sort of speed without heavy optimisation. In fact I'd be amazed if www.google.com isn't the most heavily optimised page on the internet. So it's not at all surprising to me that they optimise based on what browser is asking.

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

#258

Post by stonogo »

forward1 wrote: post #250
adamryman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have no evidence to support this assertion. I know this because there is no objective "browser quality" standard. It is as least as likely that Google aggressively advertising it on every single page load of every single web presence gained traction for chrome.

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

#259

Post by emeril »

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.

LOL

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

#260

Post by 1oooqooq »

acdha wrote: post #233
1oooqooq wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You proved my (overly condescending) point.

You either support older TLS or you don't. Do not try to fine tune it to one known audience. You just locked everyone that is not in the sample you just whitelisted(!) out of your service. But you don't know about them, so no harm? If you think one use case for tls1.1 is OK for one use case, just accept you support it.

Same for every thing else. Every time you use UA sniff, you are doing it wrong. not matter how smart you think you are. You are not. It's just a momentary feel good because you are oblivious to everything else. Just like you felt good when you blocked tls1.1 before knowing of those blind users. Now you felt good allowing those blind users because you still don't know about another group that you might learn tomorrow or never, because you are blocking them :)

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