23 ms·

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

447 points by mozvalentin 3y ago

alcoholic_byte 3y ago
Here is a nafarious interpretation of events: (I assume we all remember how Alphabet, in order to drive Chrome adoption, sabotaged youtube when a Firefox-browser was detected?) Only breaking for new FF-versions will give the untechnical user the impression that FF broke through an upgrade. So I call this another not so feeble, but very evil(yes I think we expect nothing less of them right now), attempt of Google go tighten the grip on the Browser-eco-system. Not the least that it only impacts FF on Android. On Android the means to inspect are limited without a computer(so they might hope for users to switch because they need access and then forget to switch back). That is also, to me, a sign that it was intentional, just because how specific, browser-centric this is.
- 6510 3y ago
  here is a fun anecdotal: google wouldn't load for me on ff windos, I tried a bunch of stuff over a few days then in a lapse of sanity or a stroke of genius I decided to switch the default search engine [back] from bing to google, I press reload and the html page with the single form field worked again! It continued to work after switching to bing again. I feel I should note I have this in a user script: document.getElementsByClassName('b_logoArea')[0].href = "https://google.com/search?"+document.URL.match(/q\=[^&]*/); It makes it so that clicking the bing logo sends the query to google, perhaps it doesn't like getting queried directly without being the default search engine?
mozvalentin 3y ago
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/131916#issuecomment-1882627241 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 and it seems that this affects all UA strings with versions >= 65. <=64 work.
- aragilar 3y ago
  It's interesting if you remove "Android" from the UA, then it sends more, but remove "Mobile" it still sends only the "doctype", and removing "Firefox" fixes it entirely.
Symbiote 3y ago
Rather embarrassing that they didn't notice this in testing, but it only affects the homepage and not searches from the address bar
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  They probably did. However wanted to screw Firefox users the same way as the YouTube slowdown.
  - nairboon 3y ago
    Similar to the google image search on Firefox mobile, which has been broken for how many years now?
    - guappa 3y ago
      Well image search is broken in general. Reverse search is now completely useless for example.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    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).
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Some middle manager out there was making this decision. Not strategy heads
      - close04 3y ago
        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.
pmontra 3y ago
9 minutes ago: > Since this has now been posted to HN, I'll be locking this thread. This bugtracker is a work place, not a discussion forum. We have a bad fame.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tmtvl 3y ago
  Our bad reputation is not entirely undeserved, some of us are not as well behaved as others.
  - Uptrenda 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - augustohp 3y ago
      Although I agree his words could've been chosen more carefully, they come from someone used to work with computers. Not his forte.
    - jraph 3y ago
      OTOH do they need more input from external contributors? They have everything they need. google.com serves '<!DOCTYPE html>' to Firefox and that's the end of the webcompat story. Google needs to fix this. Full stop. Given this, I can see how this thing can attract low quality comments and have a very low chance of receiving interesting insight. Now, since we are on HN I'll provide my one low quality comment on this: I guess it's a silly mistake that's not intended, but still feels like another whoops [1]. Also: come on Google, seriously? Don't you have QA for such things? [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
    - jgraham 3y ago
      (I work on WebCompat at Mozilla) There are various people whose job involves triaging issues filed on that repo, and communicating with the issue authors where necessary e.g. to figure out additional steps required to reproduce the reported problem. The point of that effort is exactly because we value reports of site breakage so highly, and want to ensure that people reporting them have a good experience. Unfortunately when a bug report (not just this in this repo, but almost anywhere) hits (almost any) social media there's a high chance of the suddenly large audience making comments that aren't at all actionable in fixing the issue. In this case it seems highly unlikely that anyone can add additional information that will allow a faster resolution, whereas there was already one off-topic/unactionable comment at the time the issue was locked. So if we leave the issue open, it has the downside of disrupting our normal workflows, and taking attention away from fixing either the problem at hand, or any other issues that currently require our attention. To me that significantly outweighs the potential upside of leaving it open to "make people feel welcome". Of course, like many things in life, it's not a mathematical problem where you can derive a correct answer, but a set of tradeoffs based on experience, and therefore reasonable people may come to different conclusions.
andrelaszlo 3y ago
Google partners with Mozilla to deliver a completely ad-free search experience.
- donny2018 3y ago
  Which, coincidentally, happens to be search-free as well.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    which in turn makes it sound like free money from Googs
    - sitzkrieg 3y ago
      straight to the mozilla ceo
andrelaszlo 3y ago
Great screenshot https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16a554571b3cea973d2b7346457a351fa2f31266874ab72e8e3e14ff39ba73b1/68747470733a2f2f776562636f6d7061742e636f6d2f75706c6f6164732f323032342f312f36646264356165652d396339612d346338352d383739342d3564336435626334323336612e6a706567 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16a554571b3cea973d2b73464...
- _____-___ 3y ago
  I...don't know what I was expecting...
- kreeben 3y ago
  Definitely one of the greatest screenshots that I've ever seen.
Jenk 3y ago
I didn't expect to laugh but the screenshot (i.e., pure white rectangle) has tickled me.
genevra 3y ago
I wonder how this made it past testing?
- ale42 3y ago
  They test on version 64 ;)
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  Test written according to behaviour?
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  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.
  - exikyut 3y ago
    Or fewer than 20,000 bugs.
- _flux 3y ago
  Testing can never prove something works, only that something doesn't.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  I have a few guesses: Google has marginal incentive to not kill Firefox (antitrust), they have no incentive to make sure they provide a good experience on Firefox, let alone test with it. The issue seems to be isolated to the search home page, and Google Search hasn't exactly been associated with "quality" in several years. Internal rot and disinterest gradually chip away at QA.
- dathinab 3y ago
  simply: they don't test at least not for firefox mobile they probably test for chrome (desktop+mobile), safari (desktop+mobile), edge(desktop) and maybe Firefox (desktop) but probably no other browser
conradfr 3y ago
Funny that it works when switching to desktop mode. I never actually looked at what this does.
- andirk 3y ago
  I think it changes your user agent string to something that doesn't say "mobile", and the device "inner resolution" or something like that to make it zoom out. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+my+user+agent+string https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+my+user+agent+string https://www.whatismyscreenresolution.org/ https://www.whatismyscreenresolution.org/
rthkljlkrj 3y ago
[dead]
rendaw 3y ago
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?
- throwaway167 3y ago
  Track you in new and exciting ways.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  Google provides a more basic webpage for older browsers.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Introducing ‘about: blank’ by Google. A new way to experience the web.
    - djbusby 3y ago
      Will be shuttered in less than 5 years.
      - sumtechguy 3y ago
        such optimism!
  - Aissen 3y ago
    And they often do that wrongly. Try typing "weather" in Firefox for Android vs Chrome for Android; a vastly inferior version is shown on Firefox. Changing the UA or using desktop mode makes the page work flawlessly.
    - Miner49er 3y ago
      Wow, that's very anticompetitive.
- 3y ago
fxtentacle 3y ago
The 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.
- adlpz 3y ago
  A bit hyperbolic, aren't we? Count me in for the destruction of the do-be-evil giant, but we're far from it not being absolutely dominant in the space. I didn't even know what Kagi was.
  - fxtentacle 3y ago
    No, I actually use Kagi both on my Laptop and on my Firefox on Android. It has one killer feature: you can block Pinterest from spamming your results.
    - andirk 3y ago
      And w3schools!
    - AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y ago
      Blocking domains is big part of why I use Kagi, I wish they should share their top blocked domains or make it that people can share their blocked domains to help others. They have this https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats, but I'd like something I can import into my own settings to use.
      - jorams 3y ago
        On the Domain insights tab of that page, the right column is "Your status". You can click a status there to instantly apply it to the domain.
      - Kuinox 3y ago
        You mean this page ? https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard The top 7 blocked domain are just pinterest.
rudasn 3y ago
Google search doesn't even work on mobile anymore with javascript disabled.
kramerger 3y ago
Key part ( from https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/131916#issuecomment-1882627241 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 <!DOCTYPE html>% and it seems that this affects all UA strings with versions >= 65. <=64 work."
- stuaxo 3y ago
  I was seeing this on Gmail on Linux Firefox about a couple of weeks ago for a week.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Specifically, Firefox Mobile. Whatever UA string Firefox Mobile sends in desktop mode returned fine.
Fatnino 3y ago
Firefox should just change its ua to not-chromium. We will all know what it means.
- 1oooqooq 3y ago
  you joke, but microsoft using "mozilla" on IE useragent is why to this day every single browser have "Mozilla/5.0" there. At the time netscape and microsoft were giving out free browsers while fighting for control of the profitable httpd server market, and blocking competitor browsers "for security" or something else was the play book of the day.
leosanchez 3y ago
Google used to disable Sports scores when opened from Firefox. I had to add a separate extension to circumvent that. Just an evil company really.
tommica 3y ago
Oh, that's why the search wasn't working earlier - I blamed my phone/browser.
awicz 3y ago
kagi.com
- ravenstine 3y ago
  I know that jumping in to mention Kagi has become a meme on HN, but I do think it's important to keep encouraging people to move away from Google. The specific search engine barely even matters, as much as I like Kagi. The only way that any of these search engines are going to improve is if more people leave Google in the dust. If people don't want to pay for Kagi, then use Brave Search. DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    >DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that. I've seen this a lot lately, but no one has said why. I solely use DDG and have done so for a long time. I have not noticed any specific changes, nor any degradation in my search results. I don't pay much attention to announcements or anything, so maybe I missed something? Can you or someone please tell me how/why DDG is suddenly not recommended and "gone downhill"?
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      In one of the comments I made elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my experience with DDG is that it's become extremely "PG-rated" even if you turn off safe search. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but to me it's pretty clear to me that DDG is way more normie-safe than when I began using it several years ago. DDG shows me more of what I consider detritus than Kagi does. It's extremely bad at finding any results by exact text, but to be fair, every search engine is bad at this now. And finally, DDG hasn't had what I would consider to be worthwhile feature improvements in a very long time. The doodads that sometimes show up when you use a particular term like "qr code hello world" are neat, but ultimately not that beneficial in contrast to being given more control over the results themselves. Their other features are mostly things that have been solved many times over.
jraph 3y ago
Google deserves Mozilla to send them a UA identical to Chrome.
Draiken 3y ago
Another reason to stop using Google. Don't waste the opportunity! Switched to DDG ages ago, and even though it's not amazing, it's already better than Google. Although, if we're honest, searching these days is absolutely atrocious everywhere. Any keyword search will only net you ads or "top X" articles full of SEO garbage most likely written by AI at this point...
- diggan 3y ago
  The only thing that I've found that works properly for my use case (regularly switching between three locales and languages) is Kaggle with the lenses. The only thing missing is disconnecting the locale from the language so I can have proper decimal characters but still search for US-specific things. Right now, I have to chose between having 10,000.10 or 10.000,10 and what language/region I'm searching, together, which is a bit annoying.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    Do you mean Kagi?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    I think "Kaggle" is supposed to be Kagi but was typoed or autocorrected or something? (If not and you're talkign about Kaggle the ML/AI company, please disregard) I also use Kagi lenses and it's been good, though for me the killer Kagi feature is being able to uprank/downrank/pin/block domains. Such an obvious and simple feature, such a powerful effect. There is a psychological barrier to overcome in paying for searches, but once you get past that, Kagi makes a ton of sense. I suspect the reason Google never implemented personalized search results (like Kagi's where you can uprank/downrank domains) is because it's not about what you see, it's about what they show you. i.e. ads.
    - diggan 3y ago
      You're right of course, supposed to be Kagi, I blame it on a lack of coffee.
    - 3y ago
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
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?
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  We're back to the internet explorer days!
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  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.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Yup, it is unfortunately very common. Open `about:compat` in Firefox to see all of the cases where they work around site issues. Right now I count 32 user-agent overrides, 38 "Interventions" and 49 "SmartBlock Fixes". IIUC "Interventions" are typically injected scripts or styles and "SmartBlock Fixes" are exceptions to tracker blocking.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    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/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec...
    - fragmede 3y ago
      That’s quite the read! I didn’t appreciate how much effort went into making the Win95 compatibility layer.
ziddoap 3y ago
Just another "oops" from Google against Firefox. "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Thorrez 3y ago
Google is tracking the incident here: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i32C https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i... Disclosure: I work at Google but not on this. This was linked from the Bugzilla bug.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  What I don’t understand is why this isn’t just a rollback, or at worst a revert commit and redeploy. I can forgive an issue with a slightly obscure browser, but the fix should be trivial for Google engineers?
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    maybe not that easy if they use monorepos
  - chx 3y ago
    Well, as these things usually go... There's a feature important to Middle Manager 32456. You can't just revert it for a not-Google browser. That's just a no-go. So a fix needs to be developed, QA'd, rolled. I presume it's going to be an out-of-schedule roll so it'll probably involve some bureaucracy. (One of my clients is a few thousand people public company and even there a hotfix requires QA lead approval.) Nothing ever is simple.
  - egeozcan 3y ago
    Perhaps it's been a while since it's broken? url-bar search works so this seem to only happen if you navigate to google.com directly. How many people navigate to google to search, while using firefox on android? Just a hunch though. OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      > OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile. Why? They don't have UI tests for Opera on the Nintendo Wii either, and at this point I bet the install base for Wii-Opera is still larger than the install base for FF mobile. TBH, when I was there it surprised me that Google didn't have a dedicated hardware test-bench room with rows upon rows of browser deployments that every UI change needed to be burn-in tested on, but... They don't. They never did. In general, their strategy is to be nimble and deploy rapidly (with the expectation they can roll back rapidly). In that context, it actually makes sense why they don't have that warehouse of test-bench installations... They'd slow-down rollbacks as well as rollouts. A handful of projects have dedicated testing targets. They're driven mostly by the ideology of individual Googlers (some people really like Firefox) and a handful of high-value users that have specific installs Google isn't interested in pissing off. Since they do very little (relatively speaking) B2B business, that's a very short list of names.
rf15 3y ago
This is a good reminder that readers of HN should take to heart: Just because a popular github issue gets posted to HN doesn't mean that you should head over and do your posting there. Keep it here, usually the associated experts are already on their way or busy working on the problem and you are not helping.
soraminazuki 3y ago
Why would Google return an empty page based on any UA string? This is such a bizarre bug.
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  According to a comment on the issue, the page output is "<!DOCTYPE html>%", and that suspiciously looks like some template / placeholder evaluation might not be doing its jobs properly.
- kevincox 3y ago
  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 `<!doctype html>` 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).
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    I genuinely want to see a root cause blog post for this.
lupusreal 3y ago
Last month, Google Maps was completely broken (instant total tab lockup) for all users of a GCC-built Firefox. In that case it was Mozilla's fault, Google didn't change something to make that happen, but it tells me that Mozilla's QA is suffering and probably doesn't catch things that are Google's fault either. I'm still using Firefox because I'm ideologically motivated to, but it's no wonder that so many users are dropping the fox for chromium browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1866409 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1866409
ravenstine 3y ago
The user agent header has always been a mistake. I'm not sure what companies like Google are thinking when they block features from working based on the user agent. In Firefox, I use an add-on that randomizes the user agent string, and I've configured it to use a handful of the most common user agent strings. Occasionally, parts of YouTube will break because of a certain user agent configured, like chats or chat replay, showing nothing but a broken frame with no meaningful information to a non-developer. I guess one could say that it encourages people to update their browsers, or use Chrome which auto-updates, but come on. If a feature legitimately doesn't work, then the user still has to update to a modern browser anyway.
- kevincox 3y ago
  I don't think this is true. Having the user agent is incredibly useful when debugging an issue. It can even be useful for deploying workarounds. For example if you see that errors are being thrown on your site and nearly all of them are the new release of Chrome then you can quickly narrow down it being a compatibility issue with the new version. Similarly if someone is making broken requests to your site at a high rate it may help you figure out who it is and contact them. It can even be useful in automated use cases. If Firefox 27 has a bug it is reasonable to add very specific checks to work around it gracefully. When possible feature detection is better, but some bugs can be very hard to test for. The problem comes from: 1. People whitelisting user agents. 2. Adding wide sweeping checks, especially if you don't constantly re-evaluate them (For example Brave versions later than 32) In this case it seems that it is hard to actually conclude that a user-agent check was bad here. Google could have been trying to serve something that would work better on Firefox (maybe it worked around a bug). Of course that code crashed and burned, but that doesn't mean that the check was a bad idea. I agree that user-agents are often used for evil, but they can also be used for good. It is hard to justify completely removing them. With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately lots of people aren't responsible.
byteknight 3y ago
My favorite bug description. "The page is blank. The page is blank the page is blank."
lopis 3y ago
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.
- dylan604 3y ago
  What if it is done during testing as a beta release? If that's acceptable, Googs will just turn into one of those companies that never releases full versions and is always just in some form of beta release
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    One of those companies? Google pioneered this.
- forward1 3y ago
  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.
  - Y_Y 3y ago
    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?
    - forward1 3y ago
      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.
robblbobbl 3y ago
Hilarious
joelthelion 3y ago
This is going to happen more and more as firefox's market share decreases. And then we'll be left with chromium-based browsers...
shiomiru 3y ago
Somewhat related fun fact: if you send the Google search home page an unknown UA string (e.g. curl/8.5.0) from a German-speaking country, Google will serve a latin-1 encoded page declared as UTF-8 in a meta tag. (I spent quite a while trying to fix this on my end before realizing what was going on.)
WhackyIdeas 3y ago
This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357
- forward1 3y ago
  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.
  - phreack 3y ago
    That's discussed on GP's link, a former Firefox vice president said > "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. I tend to believe him
    - forward1 3y ago
      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 <3% of users to go and install Chrome, and assume those users knew to take that action? All while keeping this conspiracy quiet from other staff at Google and with malicious (and possibly anti-competitive) intent? Or is it possible no one cares about Firefox because so few people use it and this is the result of a simple bug?
      - 3y ago
kjkjadksj 3y ago
I have noticed with firefox google will take forever to load sometimes. I will hit refresh and the url will actually change somewhat, then the page loads instantly. Seems I sometimes get served this dead end url.
dannysullivan 3y ago
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/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i32C https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...
- jedahan 3y ago
  Would love to hear what the bug and/or fix was
  - stephenr 3y ago
    I'm more interested in why ua sniffing is considered acceptable for this.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      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)
      - 93po 3y ago
        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
        sangnoir 3y ago
        > 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.
dang 3y ago
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... (Submitted title was "Google breaks search for Firefox users because of bad UA string sniffing")

447 points by mozvalentin 3y ago

Here is a nafarious interpretation of events: (I assume we all remember how Alphabet, in order to drive Chrome adoption, sabotaged youtube when a Firefox-browser was detected?) Only breaking for new FF-versions will give the untechnical user the impression that FF broke through an upgrade. So I call this another not so feeble, but very evil(yes I think we expect nothing less of them right now), attempt of Google go tighten the grip on the Browser-eco-system. Not the least that it only impacts FF on Android. On Android the means to inspect are limited without a computer(so they might hope for users to switch because they need access and then forget to switch back). That is also, to me, a sign that it was intentional, just because how specific, browser-centric this is.

6510 3y ago
here is a fun anecdotal: google wouldn't load for me on ff windos, I tried a bunch of stuff over a few days then in a lapse of sanity or a stroke of genius I decided to switch the default search engine [back] from bing to google, I press reload and the html page with the single form field worked again! It continued to work after switching to bing again. I feel I should note I have this in a user script: document.getElementsByClassName('b_logoArea')[0].href = "https://google.com/search?"+document.URL.match(/q\=[^&]*/); It makes it so that clicking the bing logo sends the query to google, perhaps it doesn't like getting queried directly without being the default search engine?

mozvalentin 3y ago

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/131916#issuecomment-1882627241 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 and it seems that this affects all UA strings with versions >= 65. <=64 work.

aragilar 3y ago
It's interesting if you remove "Android" from the UA, then it sends more, but remove "Mobile" it still sends only the "doctype", and removing "Firefox" fixes it entirely.

Symbiote 3y ago

Rather embarrassing that they didn't notice this in testing, but it only affects the homepage and not searches from the address bar

doublerabbit 3y ago
They probably did. However wanted to screw Firefox users the same way as the YouTube slowdown.
- nairboon 3y ago
  Similar to the google image search on Firefox mobile, which has been broken for how many years now?
  - guappa 3y ago
    Well image search is broken in general. Reverse search is now completely useless for example.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  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).
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Some middle manager out there was making this decision. Not strategy heads
    - close04 3y ago
      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.

pmontra 3y ago

9 minutes ago: > Since this has now been posted to HN, I'll be locking this thread. This bugtracker is a work place, not a discussion forum. We have a bad fame.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tmtvl 3y ago
Our bad reputation is not entirely undeserved, some of us are not as well behaved as others.
- Uptrenda 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - augustohp 3y ago
    Although I agree his words could've been chosen more carefully, they come from someone used to work with computers. Not his forte.
  - jraph 3y ago
    OTOH do they need more input from external contributors? They have everything they need. google.com serves '<!DOCTYPE html>' to Firefox and that's the end of the webcompat story. Google needs to fix this. Full stop. Given this, I can see how this thing can attract low quality comments and have a very low chance of receiving interesting insight. Now, since we are on HN I'll provide my one low quality comment on this: I guess it's a silly mistake that's not intended, but still feels like another whoops [1]. Also: come on Google, seriously? Don't you have QA for such things? [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
  - jgraham 3y ago
    (I work on WebCompat at Mozilla) There are various people whose job involves triaging issues filed on that repo, and communicating with the issue authors where necessary e.g. to figure out additional steps required to reproduce the reported problem. The point of that effort is exactly because we value reports of site breakage so highly, and want to ensure that people reporting them have a good experience. Unfortunately when a bug report (not just this in this repo, but almost anywhere) hits (almost any) social media there's a high chance of the suddenly large audience making comments that aren't at all actionable in fixing the issue. In this case it seems highly unlikely that anyone can add additional information that will allow a faster resolution, whereas there was already one off-topic/unactionable comment at the time the issue was locked. So if we leave the issue open, it has the downside of disrupting our normal workflows, and taking attention away from fixing either the problem at hand, or any other issues that currently require our attention. To me that significantly outweighs the potential upside of leaving it open to "make people feel welcome". Of course, like many things in life, it's not a mathematical problem where you can derive a correct answer, but a set of tradeoffs based on experience, and therefore reasonable people may come to different conclusions.

andrelaszlo 3y ago

Google partners with Mozilla to deliver a completely ad-free search experience.

donny2018 3y ago
Which, coincidentally, happens to be search-free as well.
- dylan604 3y ago
  which in turn makes it sound like free money from Googs
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    straight to the mozilla ceo

andrelaszlo 3y ago

Great screenshot https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16a554571b3cea973d2b7346457a351fa2f31266874ab72e8e3e14ff39ba73b1/68747470733a2f2f776562636f6d7061742e636f6d2f75706c6f6164732f323032342f312f36646264356165652d396339612d346338352d383739342d3564336435626334323336612e6a706567 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16a554571b3cea973d2b73464...

_____-___ 3y ago
I...don't know what I was expecting...
kreeben 3y ago
Definitely one of the greatest screenshots that I've ever seen.

Jenk 3y ago

I didn't expect to laugh but the screenshot (i.e., pure white rectangle) has tickled me.

genevra 3y ago

I wonder how this made it past testing?

ale42 3y ago
They test on version 64 ;)
ranting-moth 3y ago
Test written according to behaviour?
shadowgovt 3y ago
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.
- exikyut 3y ago
  Or fewer than 20,000 bugs.
_flux 3y ago
Testing can never prove something works, only that something doesn't.
ryukoposting 3y ago
I have a few guesses: Google has marginal incentive to not kill Firefox (antitrust), they have no incentive to make sure they provide a good experience on Firefox, let alone test with it. The issue seems to be isolated to the search home page, and Google Search hasn't exactly been associated with "quality" in several years. Internal rot and disinterest gradually chip away at QA.
dathinab 3y ago
simply: they don't test at least not for firefox mobile they probably test for chrome (desktop+mobile), safari (desktop+mobile), edge(desktop) and maybe Firefox (desktop) but probably no other browser

conradfr 3y ago

Funny that it works when switching to desktop mode. I never actually looked at what this does.

andirk 3y ago
I think it changes your user agent string to something that doesn't say "mobile", and the device "inner resolution" or something like that to make it zoom out. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+my+user+agent+string https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+my+user+agent+string https://www.whatismyscreenresolution.org/ https://www.whatismyscreenresolution.org/

rthkljlkrj 3y ago

[dead]

rendaw 3y ago

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?

throwaway167 3y ago
Track you in new and exciting ways.
PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
Google provides a more basic webpage for older browsers.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Introducing ‘about: blank’ by Google. A new way to experience the web.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Will be shuttered in less than 5 years.
    - sumtechguy 3y ago
      such optimism!
- Aissen 3y ago
  And they often do that wrongly. Try typing "weather" in Firefox for Android vs Chrome for Android; a vastly inferior version is shown on Firefox. Changing the UA or using desktop mode makes the page work flawlessly.
  - Miner49er 3y ago
    Wow, that's very anticompetitive.
3y ago

fxtentacle 3y ago

The 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.

adlpz 3y ago
A bit hyperbolic, aren't we? Count me in for the destruction of the do-be-evil giant, but we're far from it not being absolutely dominant in the space. I didn't even know what Kagi was.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  No, I actually use Kagi both on my Laptop and on my Firefox on Android. It has one killer feature: you can block Pinterest from spamming your results.
  - andirk 3y ago
    And w3schools!
  - AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y ago
    Blocking domains is big part of why I use Kagi, I wish they should share their top blocked domains or make it that people can share their blocked domains to help others. They have this https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats, but I'd like something I can import into my own settings to use.
    - jorams 3y ago
      On the Domain insights tab of that page, the right column is "Your status". You can click a status there to instantly apply it to the domain.
    - Kuinox 3y ago
      You mean this page ? https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard The top 7 blocked domain are just pinterest.

rudasn 3y ago

Google search doesn't even work on mobile anymore with javascript disabled.

kramerger 3y ago

Key part ( from https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/131916#issuecomment-1882627241 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 <!DOCTYPE html>% and it seems that this affects all UA strings with versions >= 65. <=64 work."

stuaxo 3y ago
I was seeing this on Gmail on Linux Firefox about a couple of weeks ago for a week.
ethbr1 3y ago
Specifically, Firefox Mobile. Whatever UA string Firefox Mobile sends in desktop mode returned fine.

Fatnino 3y ago

Firefox should just change its ua to not-chromium. We will all know what it means.

1oooqooq 3y ago
you joke, but microsoft using "mozilla" on IE useragent is why to this day every single browser have "Mozilla/5.0" there. At the time netscape and microsoft were giving out free browsers while fighting for control of the profitable httpd server market, and blocking competitor browsers "for security" or something else was the play book of the day.

leosanchez 3y ago

Google used to disable Sports scores when opened from Firefox. I had to add a separate extension to circumvent that. Just an evil company really.

tommica 3y ago

Oh, that's why the search wasn't working earlier - I blamed my phone/browser.

awicz 3y ago

kagi.com

ravenstine 3y ago
I know that jumping in to mention Kagi has become a meme on HN, but I do think it's important to keep encouraging people to move away from Google. The specific search engine barely even matters, as much as I like Kagi. The only way that any of these search engines are going to improve is if more people leave Google in the dust. If people don't want to pay for Kagi, then use Brave Search. DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >DuckDuckGo was really gone downhill, so it's hard to recommend that. I've seen this a lot lately, but no one has said why. I solely use DDG and have done so for a long time. I have not noticed any specific changes, nor any degradation in my search results. I don't pay much attention to announcements or anything, so maybe I missed something? Can you or someone please tell me how/why DDG is suddenly not recommended and "gone downhill"?
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    In one of the comments I made elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned that my experience with DDG is that it's become extremely "PG-rated" even if you turn off safe search. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but to me it's pretty clear to me that DDG is way more normie-safe than when I began using it several years ago. DDG shows me more of what I consider detritus than Kagi does. It's extremely bad at finding any results by exact text, but to be fair, every search engine is bad at this now. And finally, DDG hasn't had what I would consider to be worthwhile feature improvements in a very long time. The doodads that sometimes show up when you use a particular term like "qr code hello world" are neat, but ultimately not that beneficial in contrast to being given more control over the results themselves. Their other features are mostly things that have been solved many times over.

jraph 3y ago

Google deserves Mozilla to send them a UA identical to Chrome.

Draiken 3y ago

Another reason to stop using Google. Don't waste the opportunity! Switched to DDG ages ago, and even though it's not amazing, it's already better than Google. Although, if we're honest, searching these days is absolutely atrocious everywhere. Any keyword search will only net you ads or "top X" articles full of SEO garbage most likely written by AI at this point...

diggan 3y ago
The only thing that I've found that works properly for my use case (regularly switching between three locales and languages) is Kaggle with the lenses. The only thing missing is disconnecting the locale from the language so I can have proper decimal characters but still search for US-specific things. Right now, I have to chose between having 10,000.10 or 10.000,10 and what language/region I'm searching, together, which is a bit annoying.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  Do you mean Kagi?
- freedomben 3y ago
  I think "Kaggle" is supposed to be Kagi but was typoed or autocorrected or something? (If not and you're talkign about Kaggle the ML/AI company, please disregard) I also use Kagi lenses and it's been good, though for me the killer Kagi feature is being able to uprank/downrank/pin/block domains. Such an obvious and simple feature, such a powerful effect. There is a psychological barrier to overcome in paying for searches, but once you get past that, Kagi makes a ton of sense. I suspect the reason Google never implemented personalized search results (like Kagi's where you can uprank/downrank domains) is because it's not about what you see, it's about what they show you. i.e. ads.
  - diggan 3y ago
    You're right of course, supposed to be Kagi, I blame it on a lack of coffee.
  - 3y ago

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

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?

datadrivenangel 3y ago
We're back to the internet explorer days!
oh_sigh 3y ago
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.
- kevincox 3y ago
  Yup, it is unfortunately very common. Open `about:compat` in Firefox to see all of the cases where they work around site issues. Right now I count 32 user-agent overrides, 38 "Interventions" and 49 "SmartBlock Fixes". IIUC "Interventions" are typically injected scripts or styles and "SmartBlock Fixes" are exceptions to tracker blocking.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  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/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch01.pdf https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec...
  - fragmede 3y ago
    That’s quite the read! I didn’t appreciate how much effort went into making the Win95 compatibility layer.

ziddoap 3y ago

Just another "oops" from Google against Firefox. "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Thorrez 3y ago

Google is tracking the incident here: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i32C https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i... Disclosure: I work at Google but not on this. This was linked from the Bugzilla bug.

robin_reala 3y ago
What I don’t understand is why this isn’t just a rollback, or at worst a revert commit and redeploy. I can forgive an issue with a slightly obscure browser, but the fix should be trivial for Google engineers?
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  maybe not that easy if they use monorepos
- chx 3y ago
  Well, as these things usually go... There's a feature important to Middle Manager 32456. You can't just revert it for a not-Google browser. That's just a no-go. So a fix needs to be developed, QA'd, rolled. I presume it's going to be an out-of-schedule roll so it'll probably involve some bureaucracy. (One of my clients is a few thousand people public company and even there a hotfix requires QA lead approval.) Nothing ever is simple.
- egeozcan 3y ago
  Perhaps it's been a while since it's broken? url-bar search works so this seem to only happen if you navigate to google.com directly. How many people navigate to google to search, while using firefox on android? Just a hunch though. OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    > OTOH, it's amazing that apparently they don't have UI tests for FF mobile. Why? They don't have UI tests for Opera on the Nintendo Wii either, and at this point I bet the install base for Wii-Opera is still larger than the install base for FF mobile. TBH, when I was there it surprised me that Google didn't have a dedicated hardware test-bench room with rows upon rows of browser deployments that every UI change needed to be burn-in tested on, but... They don't. They never did. In general, their strategy is to be nimble and deploy rapidly (with the expectation they can roll back rapidly). In that context, it actually makes sense why they don't have that warehouse of test-bench installations... They'd slow-down rollbacks as well as rollouts. A handful of projects have dedicated testing targets. They're driven mostly by the ideology of individual Googlers (some people really like Firefox) and a handful of high-value users that have specific installs Google isn't interested in pissing off. Since they do very little (relatively speaking) B2B business, that's a very short list of names.

rf15 3y ago

This is a good reminder that readers of HN should take to heart: Just because a popular github issue gets posted to HN doesn't mean that you should head over and do your posting there. Keep it here, usually the associated experts are already on their way or busy working on the problem and you are not helping.

soraminazuki 3y ago

Why would Google return an empty page based on any UA string? This is such a bizarre bug.

TonyTrapp 3y ago
According to a comment on the issue, the page output is "<!DOCTYPE html>%", and that suspiciously looks like some template / placeholder evaluation might not be doing its jobs properly.
kevincox 3y ago
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 `<!doctype html>` 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).
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  I genuinely want to see a root cause blog post for this.

lupusreal 3y ago

Last month, Google Maps was completely broken (instant total tab lockup) for all users of a GCC-built Firefox. In that case it was Mozilla's fault, Google didn't change something to make that happen, but it tells me that Mozilla's QA is suffering and probably doesn't catch things that are Google's fault either. I'm still using Firefox because I'm ideologically motivated to, but it's no wonder that so many users are dropping the fox for chromium browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1866409 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1866409

ravenstine 3y ago

The user agent header has always been a mistake. I'm not sure what companies like Google are thinking when they block features from working based on the user agent. In Firefox, I use an add-on that randomizes the user agent string, and I've configured it to use a handful of the most common user agent strings. Occasionally, parts of YouTube will break because of a certain user agent configured, like chats or chat replay, showing nothing but a broken frame with no meaningful information to a non-developer. I guess one could say that it encourages people to update their browsers, or use Chrome which auto-updates, but come on. If a feature legitimately doesn't work, then the user still has to update to a modern browser anyway.

kevincox 3y ago
I don't think this is true. Having the user agent is incredibly useful when debugging an issue. It can even be useful for deploying workarounds. For example if you see that errors are being thrown on your site and nearly all of them are the new release of Chrome then you can quickly narrow down it being a compatibility issue with the new version. Similarly if someone is making broken requests to your site at a high rate it may help you figure out who it is and contact them. It can even be useful in automated use cases. If Firefox 27 has a bug it is reasonable to add very specific checks to work around it gracefully. When possible feature detection is better, but some bugs can be very hard to test for. The problem comes from: 1. People whitelisting user agents. 2. Adding wide sweeping checks, especially if you don't constantly re-evaluate them (For example Brave versions later than 32) In this case it seems that it is hard to actually conclude that a user-agent check was bad here. Google could have been trying to serve something that would work better on Firefox (maybe it worked around a bug). Of course that code crashed and burned, but that doesn't mean that the check was a bad idea. I agree that user-agents are often used for evil, but they can also be used for good. It is hard to justify completely removing them. With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately lots of people aren't responsible.

byteknight 3y ago

My favorite bug description. "The page is blank. The page is blank the page is blank."

lopis 3y ago

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.

dylan604 3y ago
What if it is done during testing as a beta release? If that's acceptable, Googs will just turn into one of those companies that never releases full versions and is always just in some form of beta release
- globular-toast 3y ago
  One of those companies? Google pioneered this.
forward1 3y ago
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.
- Y_Y 3y ago
  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?
  - forward1 3y ago
    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.

robblbobbl 3y ago

Hilarious

joelthelion 3y ago

This is going to happen more and more as firefox's market share decreases. And then we'll be left with chromium-based browsers...

shiomiru 3y ago

Somewhat related fun fact: if you send the Google search home page an unknown UA string (e.g. curl/8.5.0) from a German-speaking country, Google will serve a latin-1 encoded page declared as UTF-8 in a meta tag. (I spent quite a while trying to fix this on my end before realizing what was going on.)

WhackyIdeas 3y ago

This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357

forward1 3y ago
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.
- phreack 3y ago
  That's discussed on GP's link, a former Firefox vice president said > "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. I tend to believe him
  - forward1 3y ago
    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 <3% of users to go and install Chrome, and assume those users knew to take that action? All while keeping this conspiracy quiet from other staff at Google and with malicious (and possibly anti-competitive) intent? Or is it possible no one cares about Firefox because so few people use it and this is the result of a simple bug?
    - 3y ago

kjkjadksj 3y ago

I have noticed with firefox google will take forever to load sometimes. I will hit refresh and the url will actually change somewhat, then the page loads instantly. Seems I sometimes get served this dead end url.

dannysullivan 3y ago

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/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i32C https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...

jedahan 3y ago
Would love to hear what the bug and/or fix was
- stephenr 3y ago
  I'm more interested in why ua sniffing is considered acceptable for this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    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)
    - 93po 3y ago
      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
      - sangnoir 3y ago
        > 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.

dang 3y ago

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... (Submitted title was "Google breaks search for Firefox users because of bad UA string sniffing")