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Google.com search now refusing to search for FF esr 128 without JavaScript
It just redirects everything to https://www.google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=... I guess this is the inevitable end of the era of the web as a collection of hyperlinked documents and the beginning of the web as an application delivery protocol.
In other browsers with JS disabled google search still works but this computational paywall rollout for Firefox esr is a sign of things to come.
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoDisappointing. DuckDuckGo seems to still work w/o JS enabled. But Bing also fails to do anything w/o JS. HN comments still seem to work, thankfully.
- stepupmakeup 2y agoDuckDuckGo specifically offers JS-free frontends and Bing still works -- it's just their tracking redirect pages that require JS. Thankfully userscripts exist to deobfuscate the tracking URLs to plain ones on search results (as they're slightly more complex than Googles)
- qwertox 2y agoCan userscripts run in a page which has JS disabled?
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoHow do you get Bing to work? I go there, type in a query, hit return and then nothing. The eyeglass icon seems like it could be a search button, but nothing happens when it's clicked. I should mention I'm trying it on Firefox 128.6.0esr.
- jmclnx 2y agoI think google did this to force AI on us. Does not matter to me, I left google a year or 2 ago. Makes me wonder about Google and AI, with my tin-foil hat on, I cannot help but think Google/AI searches your cache and cookies looking for info.
- narmiouh 2y agoThe way web applications work, there is domain separation of data (be it cache or cookies), so googles "AI" isn't going to be able to read data that it already didn't have access to before.
- compootr 2y agothis wouldn't matter if the page itself was calling the AI thingamajig
- varenc 2y agoThis isn't making sense to me. Due to the same-origin policy, anything on google.com can only access the cookies and other application data stored there by google.com. Doesn't matter if it's JavaScript or an "AI", Google can't break the same-origin policy and read cookies from other domains. AI changes nothing about this. (Google services' widespread use by 3rd party sites does give them more data, but they have that whether you load google.com with JS or not. And again, unclear how AI changes anything about what data is available to them.)
- stepupmakeup 2y agoGoogle can eventually allow anything on their domains to access whatever they want in the future and the end user can do nothing about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40918052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40918052
- skeledrew 2y agoIf they do go this route it'd of course be highly controversial (not that they care), but also limited to Chrome. Even if they dare put it in Chromium itself, Brave, Vivaldi, etc would rip it out. Microsoft would just redirect the collection in Edge to their servers.
- rafram 2y ago
- relyks 2y agoMaybe try changing the user agent? I can use Google on my Kindle's web browser and that can barely handle Javascript (though the Kindle does do limited execution)
- superkuh 2y agoI have tried spoofing the user agent. No effect. It seems to be if the browser is new enough then if JS is turned off it blocks you. But if you use a really old browser (~2015 Firefox) that doesn't support modern stuff it still allows non-JS search. I think they must have the server looking at HTTP header or fingerprinting or something. I don't think they could do the redirect based on CSS or HTML5 support without JS being run.
- nicoburns 2y agoI believe they're doing a meta-tag redirect (possibly inside a noscript tag?) in at least some cases. Source: I'm developing a web engine that doesn't have JS support.
- ronjouch 2y agoThat's exactly what they are doing: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head><title>Google Search</title>...</head> <body> <noscript> <meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=..." http-equiv="refresh"> <div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=...">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div> </noscript>...
- superkuh 2y agoYou're correct. <noscript><meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=a3qIZ42cGcvcp84P5p_mwQI" http-equiv="refresh"><style>table,div,span,p{display:none}</style><div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=a3qIZ42cGcvcp84P5p_mwQI">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div></noscript></header>
- ronjouch 2y agoGenerally works for me with https://www.google.com/search?gbv=1&q=test https://www.google.com/search?gbv=1&q=test with JS blocked at domain-level by uBlock Origin. With the caveat that this used to 100% work, but since a couple months, it indeed occasionally redirects to the “Turn on JavaScript to keep searching” page you mention, https://www.google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs https://www.google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs . I'd say the refusal happens 1 / 20 searches. Said differently, I’d prefix your “refusing” with a “sometimes”. I haven’t investigated the reason for this sometimes-ness. Would love to find an answer here, or ideas/leads (aside switching to another search engine, yes I do know about them, but sometimes Google remains better). Or maybe the sometimes-ness was just A/B testing, and the full switch is happening and this is now a thing of the past. EDIT you must have posted precisely at the moment of the end of the A/B test: I did several non-JS searches today at $job, and to confirm what I was writing here I did a test one, successfully. But 30min later, I confirm your observation: 100% blocked.
- inetknght 2y agoStop using Google. Google has literally nothing but SEO spam and malware. Use DuckDuckGo or Kagi.
- ronjouch 2y agoGoogle is currently the only search engine allowed to crawl Reddit, which sometimes yields good original user content of actual { non-blogspam, non-SEOed-to-hell, non-AI } value.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mastazi 2y agoAll search engines include Reddit results by default and you can usually refine by adding some param like site:reddit.com which works the same in Google as in other search engines e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=filter+coffee+site%3Areddit.com&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=filter+coffee+site%3Areddit... Edit: maybe you are thinking about the AI deal which is exclusive to Google. That's not the same thing as search engine indexing https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-reddit-60-million-deal-ai-training/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-reddit-60-million-deal-a...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cpressland 2y agoWhile I couldn’t find a better document: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/search-engines/google-is-now-the-only-search-engine-that-shows-recent-reddit-posts-in-results-heres-why https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/search-engines/google-is... describes how non-Google search engines cannot get new results from Reddit.
- mastazi 2y agoYes, I was wrong. I found this one as well https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/non-google-search-engines-blocked-from-showing-recent-reddit-results/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/non-google-search-en...
- simonw 2y agoWhat's FF esr 128? EDIT: Figured it out - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ca4ii3/what_is_firefox_esr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ca4ii3/what_is_fi... - it's "Firefox Extended Support Release" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cycle https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cyc...
- denkmoon 2y agoFirefox Extended Support Release version 128
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- NetworkPerson 2y agoFirefox extended service release
- superkuh 2y agoYep, sorry. The default browser for Debian Linux. I've also found it's blocking firefox forks like Palemoon 33. But really old browsers from the 2015 era don't get blocked (yet). User-agent spoofing does nothing.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoHow does it detect despite the user-agent?
- superkuh 2y agoI was wrong. There are a few user-agents they still allow. Like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0"
- denkmoon 2y agoGood time to get off google then!
- rodarima 2y agoSame on Dillo, reloading makes the JS wall go away for now, but probably won't last. Edit: Reloading doesn't work anymore for me. Unless the sca_esv=xxxxxxxxx param is present it will redirect to the JS wall.
- throwaway290 2y agoI guess google is fed up with freeloader piggy backing. Requiring JS is going to break a bunch of LLM crawlers immediately
- superkuh 2y agoIt'll also break for a lot of of people with impaired vision and screen readers. Screen readers can't keep up with the insane development pace of JS and CSS and so people with impaired vision are going to be left behind. It's an accessibility nightmare.
- duskwuff 2y agoThis is a common myth. Screen readers are not a type of web browser. They are software which interacts with other software running on the computer, including web browsers. There is nothing which inherently makes JS or CSS incompatible with screen readers.
- superkuh 2y agoTwo words: shadow dom. Now tell me how a reader is supposed to know what's what?
- inetknght 2y agoThat doesn't make it a myth. There are plenty of screen readers that break directly because of shitty use of javascript.
- duskwuff 2y agoSure. But it certainly isn't as simple as "screen readers don't support Javascript or CSS" (or whatever). You can make an inaccessible web site with or without modern web technologies - a site based around HTML image maps or table layouts will baffle a screen reader just as badly.
- throwaway290 2y ago
- Waterluvian 2y agoI think that lamenting the end of an era because Google doesn’t offer hyperlinked docs is like lamenting the end of fine dining because Olive Garden doesn’t offer cloth serviettes. We’re looking in the wrong place if we want an ad company to be the champion of anything but revenue optimization.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoIt is not just Firefox esr 128. I can reproduce this with other UA strings. It has been intermittent for me so far. Sometimes I get /hhtpservice/retry/enablejs? and sometimes I get results as usual. I do all searching from the command line. No Javascript. Some HN commenters suggest DDG or paid search. Funnily enough, DDG is returning a CAPTCHA at the moment. Fortunately I have many other free www search engine options that are working fine. In addition there are countless website search engines that all continue to work. No Javascript required.
- unaut 2y agoThis is just outrageous, I'm off to DuckDuckGo then.
- freediver 2y agoPretty proud of the fact that Kagi not only works without Javascript, but it looks and behaves almost the same. Javascript is used to enhance the UX not create it. It is like 'lite' mode is always on.
- randomjavascrip 2y agoGoogle is now forcing my to go elsewhere and I pay for gsuite. I may as well move it all over to Proton. I use noscript and refuse to turn on JavaScript for anything but actual Web Applications. I do not turn it on for general browsing of content to be read or search because the the UX abuse that JavaScript enables. The majority of exploits in the wild are delivered via drive by JavaScript. That said I'm all for honest Advertising if the UX is not shit. In fact I think there should be an HTML5 <ad></ad> tag implmented in the browsers sandbox that supports IAB VAST specs so none the that "VAST MACRO" garbage would need to done via huge JavaScript payloads.
- randomjavascrip 2y agoMaybe Proton should get into the search business. Except Proton requires I turn on JavaScript.
- niutech 2y agoI've filed this issue in their Google Search Community: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/318978583 https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/318978583 You can also click the wrench icon in the Google SERP and choose Send feedback. In the meantime, use another search engine, such as Brave Search, DDG or Searx.
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoSomewhat apropos... this isn't the first time people have been curious about which websites work with JS turned off: From five years ago: https://dev.to/ziizium/famous-websites-with-javascript-disabled-2ib1 https://dev.to/ziizium/famous-websites-with-javascript-disab... And eight years ago: https://www.jakobstoeck.de/2017/websites-which-work-great-without-javascript/ https://www.jakobstoeck.de/2017/websites-which-work-great-wi... It does seem like JavaScript is required on more sites as time moves forward.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago"It does seem like Javascript is required on more sites as time moves forward." If the statement was "Javascript is used on more sites" then I would agree and it is easy to test for use of Javascript. But a statement like "Javascript is required on more sites" is difficult to agree with as I have a very different experience.. For example, I am now retrieving Google results from the command line without Javascript using a specific UA string. Arguably, that means no Javascript is "required" to retrieve search results. A specific UA string is now required though. Use the wrong UA string and then Javascript is "required" to retrieve the results. Rather than focusing on Javascript, a more interesting question might be whether more sites are requiring specific UA strings. By default I do not use Javascript (I do not use a graphical web browser) nor do I send a User-Agent header. The overwhelming majority of websites "work" for me with no problems. To me, it does not seem that more sites are requring specific UA strings as time moves forward. Google www search is just one website. The www is vast.
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoYes. I know WGET and CURL are a thing. I should have mentioned I was talking about requesting and rendering (mostly) HTML+CSS via a web browser, not the command line. And even when I use the command line, I more often use `lynx -dump` than `w3c`.
- usere9364382 2y agoAre there any alternatives? On the browser that I use, with javascript disabled, Ask.com: Does not work; does nothing at all. Ecosia: Blocks me indirectly by cloudflare. Startpage: Blocks me explicitly, saying "Your connection has been suspended"
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoFWIW... I was able to get startpage.com to work with javascript turned off. But it doesn't really look that nice in a text browser. Maybe they're doing some weird geofencing or dislike your ISP?
- niutech 2y agoThere are alternatives: - https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ - https://searx.be https://searx.be - https://mojeek.com https://mojeek.com - http://frogfind.com http://frogfind.com
- dilDDoS 2y agoHighly recommend Kagi Search as an alternative. The results are generally better than Google's anyways, and don't require JavaScript. It is a paid service, but at this point having reliable/privacy-respecting search is worth it. Not affiliated with Kagi btw.
- Sherl 2y agoI see it compares between ads/sponsored vs kagi showcasing just webpages. If I use ublock and block elements, does Kagi has advantage over it? In other words, are the search results superior barring QOL improvement could Kagi possibly bring.
- dilDDoS 2y agoI personally find the search results from Kagi to be superior to Google/DDG/etc, beyond just not having ads or sponsored content. Before switching to Kagi, I had started to feel like a lot of the front page results from Google were just sites that had managed to maximize their SEO but not actually have much valuable content. That hasn’t seemed to be the case with Kagi. I generally find that the results from them are a lot more informative. Of course that’s highly subjective, so I think it’s worth trying out their free tier to see if the potential improvement in search result quality is something you notice and find valuable enough to spend money on.
- niutech 2y agoOr use free SearXNG: https://searx.be https://searx.be
- idiocrat 2y agoGood that there are also non-EU instances of searx. Here is an extended list: https://searx.space/ https://searx.space/
- antoine_b 2y agoCouldn't agree more. Definitely worth the $10 a month.
- butz 2y agoIs anyone collecting links to interesting sites that work without javascript? This could slowly be turned into a simple search engine that returns only results compatible with Dillo and other small browsers.
- niutech 2y agoThere is already FrogFind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152866
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoIt occurs to me this might be of interest to readers in this thread. A couple years ago I put together a list of sites that render well using Lynx and EWW. Since both browsers don't support JavaScript out of the box, maybe this is interesting to people here? https://ohmeadhbh.github.io/bobcat/ I noticed the Greycoder site has several sites I should probably add. But if you have a link you think should be included, please submit a PR on GitHub. While I'm not horribly sensitive to Github's weirdness after being purchased by Microsoft, I am sensitive to people who are sensitive to it. So if you don't want to go onto GitHub to submit a PR, you can find my email address at https://github.com/ohmeadhbh, just send me an email.
- arhcoder 2y agoSERP systems are no longer working because of this. Lynx seems to be a solution here.
- Kodiologist 2y agoI got it to work again with a user agent from Links: `Links (2.29; Linux 6.11.0-13-generic x86_64; GNU C 13.2; text)`.
- ryanator777 2y agoJust wrote a blog post covering this topic: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/ https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/
- ryanator777 2y agoJust published a blog post on this topic. We've been fortunate at SerpApi to avoid too many negative effects of this, but I think other web scraping companies were hit harder. https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/ https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/
- Scraper0024 2y ago[dead]
- sabotage3 2y agoWhy can Google scrape everything and train its AI on our texts, while we are forbidden?