I wonder how this made it past testing?
Test written according to behaviour?
www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
31–40 of 320 posts
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#32Google search doesn't even work on mobile anymore with javascript disabled.
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#33Rather embarrassing that they didn't notice this in testing, but it only affects the homepage and not searches from the address bar
They probably did. However wanted to screw Firefox users the same way as the YouTube slowdown.
There's a much easier explanation.
They didn't test on it at all. It's a browser with sub-5% market share.
There are folks in Google who personally test on firefox and believe in it ideologically as an important peace of the web ecosystem, but that's not a company policy and detecting Firefox bugs does not gate feature release for most projects.
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems unlikely they'd want to sabotage Firefox. Google is Firefox' primary source of income, and Firefox is strategically crucial token competition that stands between Google and an antitrust lawsuit of the sort Microsoft faced in the early 2000s (where Microsoft were basically a technicality away from being broken up).
Some middle manager out there was making this decision. Not strategy heads
Strategy heads come up with the strategy - friction. Enough friction against Firefox will let the browser still exist (essential for the claim that there is competition) but without actually being able to compete.
Middle management finds a tactic that implements the friction strategy - small "random" breaks and persistent performance issues.
An engineer would find the precise measure to implement - break the UA string sniffing targeting a specific browser.
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#35Key part ( from
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/131916#issuecom...)
"This is entirely server-side UA sniffing going wrong. You get an empty HTML doc, only a doctype, with a Firefox Android UA. You can reproduce this with curl,
$ curl -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:123.0) Gecko/123.0 Firefox/123.0" https://www.google.com
%
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never been clear to me that Google is actively trying to take-out Firefox. Firefox's user base is pretty small - so if they succeed in reducing it they'd gain very little but lose some shielding from antitrust accusations. I suspect that these problems are more to do with neglecting testing, and just not caring very much about non-Chromium browsers (Disclosure: I'm a long-time Firefox user)
Antitrust is just money to pay for Google. Firefox is cancer to Google.
I do not know it that is true. Cancer tends to grow... ;)
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#37I wonder how this made it past testing?
They don't test on Firefox mobile.
Not explicitly anyway. Google's testing strategy is as it has always been: do some in-house burn-in testing, then launch to a small number of users and check for unexpected failures, then widen the launch window, then launch to 100%.
In this case, the user base in question is so miniscule that no bugs probably showed up at the 1%, 10%, and 50% launch gates.
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some middle manager out there was making this decision. Not strategy heads
Strategy heads come up with the strategy - friction. Enough friction against Firefox will let the browser still exist (essential for the claim that there is competition) but without actually being able to compete. Middle management finds a tactic that implements the friction strategy - small "random" breaks and persistent performance issues. An engineer would find the precise measure to implement - break the UA strin…
> Enough friction against Firefox will let the browser still exist (essential for the claim that there is competition) but without actually being able to compete.
Interesting theory, but that's exactly what M$ got dinged for in the antitrust suit re: Netscape.
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#39The fact that I didn't notice because I'm using Kagi anyway is probably one of the first hints at Google's downfall w.r.t. search dominance.
Re: www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed
#40Google partners with Mozilla to deliver a completely ad-free search experience.
Which, coincidentally, happens to be search-free as well.