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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

#271
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much JavaScript is needed to accept my text input and provide auto complete options? Pretty wild we need to worry about browser compatibility to do this

> How much JavaScript is needed to accept my text input and provide auto complete options? If you're talking about Google's homepage, the answer is "a lot". You can check for yourself - go to google.com, select "view source" and compare the amount of Closure-compiled JavaScript against HTML markup.

I think you've missed the point. Google's primary web search feature could, in theory, be implemented without a line of JavaScript. That's how it was years and years ago anyway.

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

#272
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much JavaScript is needed to accept my text input and provide auto complete options? If you're talking about Google's homepage, the answer is "a lot". You can check for yourself - go to google.com, select "view source" and compare the amount of Closure-compiled JavaScript against HTML markup.

I think you've missed the point. Google's primary web search feature could, in theory, be implemented without a line of JavaScript. That's how it was years and years ago anyway.

I use Firefox with the NoScript addon and google.com still works just fine.

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

#273
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 ama…

Wouldn't a 20 ms RTT mean 20 ms is swallowed by the Internet? As long as your 10 suggestions fit within the TCP receive window, you already have an active connection from the initial page load, so it's 1 RTT to get the data (you could put the images into data URIs so everything could be gathered in 1 fetch, right?). I'd expect the UI update to set a list of 10 items should also take way less time than a single frame. The 200 ms search seems impressive without me knowing much about what it needs to do, but the UI portion seems trivial?

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

#274
post #177
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I went that route, I’d have to set them up on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc, all of which have different operating systems/web browsers. I guess I could implement them as a web server, and point all my devices at it.

Some browsers sync these settings, so that removes a lot of the complexity. But in general, you're repeating the same mistake. No, you wouldn't have to do that, you'd just set it up on the devices you use the most to get the most convenience in the most common cases, and then use the less convenient option on others. There is no point in making 100% of your experience worse just because you can't make 100% of your ex…

None of the browsers I use across those devices sync settings well. Even if it was 100% firefox, I don't want to trust the cloud, and can't be bothered to set up a mozilla sync server just for this (I don't use bookmarks, and there aren't any other settings I want to sync).

Also, as it is, I make 100% of my experience better by switching all the browsers to a search engine that provides better results than google and has !bang support.

There are at least two such search engines: duck duck go and kagi.

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

#275
post #65
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you certain that search is more important than chrome? Sure search was their first product, but they have long since pivoted to being an ad company. And while yes, they can show ads along side search, the real cash cow is all the juicy data they can exclusively hoover up through Chrome to better target ads all across the web not just search.

Chrome is okish for collecting data. But they have Android which probably provides 100x the data.

And indeed, we are talking about Firefox on android here.

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

#276

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.

> Get a faster computer.

Yeah my m2 max is a total fucking slouch, just barely better than a 486.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It's wild to think that everything we've collectively learned as an industry is being forgotten, just 20 years later.

- We're on the verge of another browser monopoly, cheered on by developers embracing the single controlling vendor;

- We already have sites declaring that they "work best in Chrome" when what they really mean is "we only bothered to test in Chrome".

- People are not only using UA sniffing with inevitable disastrous results, they're proclaiming loudly that it's both necessary and "the best" solution.

- The amount of unnecessary JavaScript is truly gargantuan, because how else are you going to pad your resume?

I mean really what's next?

Are we going to start adopting image slice layouts again because browsers gained machine vision capabilities?

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

#278
post #274
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some browsers sync these settings, so that removes a lot of the complexity. But in general, you're repeating the same mistake. No, you wouldn't have to do that, you'd just set it up on the devices you use the most to get the most convenience in the most common cases, and then use the less convenient option on others. There is no point in making 100% of your experience worse just because you can't make 100% of your ex…

None of the browsers I use across those devices sync settings well. Even if it was 100% firefox, I don't want to trust the cloud, and can't be bothered to set up a mozilla sync server just for this (I don't use bookmarks, and there aren't any other settings I want to sync). Also, as it is, I make 100% of my experience better by switching all the browsers to a search engine that provides better results than google and…

To make an actual "better" argument you have to address the aforementioned limitations

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

#279
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

How much JavaScript is needed to accept my text input and provide auto complete options? Pretty wild we need to worry about browser compatibility to do this

Google is an advertising company. I’m sure they’re collecting quite a bit more then just your text input
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