[HN Gopher] www.google.com - The page is blank when accessed
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www.google.com - The page is blank when accessed
Author : mozvalentin
Score : 417 points
Date : 2024-01-09 10:04 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| mozvalentin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Rather embarrassing that they didn't notice this in testing, but
| it only affects the homepage and not searches from the address
| bar
| doublerabbit wrote:
| They probably did.
|
| However wanted to screw Firefox users the same way as the
| YouTube slowdown.
| nairboon wrote:
| Similar to the google image search on Firefox mobile, which
| has been broken for how many years now?
| guappa wrote:
| Well image search is broken in general.
|
| Reverse search is now completely useless for example.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Some middle manager out there was making this decision. Not
| strategy heads
| close04 wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Google doesn't care, they knowingly implemented the
| mother of all illegal antipattern cookie banners and only
| changed it after getting fined over $100M.
|
| If the risk is a lawsuit after years of anticompetitive
| behaviour - if they're unlucky - that's absolutely worth
| it for Google. Chrome is now THE web browser platform
| with the only two remaining notable exceptions being
| competitors in name only, and no single lawsuit can just
| reverse that.
| close04 wrote:
| MS waged a lot more open war against Netscape, and
| documented their desire to "extinguish", "smother", and
| "cut off Netscape's air supply".
|
| Google is doing more "eternal irritation by 1000
| papercuts". Never one big blow, never aiming to kill
| Firefox, they're financing it after all. Firefox needs to
| exist but never be attractive to users, especially on the
| phone where tracking is next level.
|
| I think plausible deniability does a lot of the heavy
| lifting here. But statistically speaking Firefox being
| the one browser hit constantly by a stream of random
| Google issues can't be _random_.
|
| The legal and regulatory landscape changed a lot since
| then too, with Big Tech slowly but constantly lobbying
| and pushing a lot more than just these tactics into
| normalcy. A lot of what's normal today was outrageous in
| the '90s.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Sometimes! And sometimes a middle manager just does what
| he thinks clears the ticket quickly enough and then
| someone yells at him.
|
| Assuming competence and intention is foolish.
| oblio wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You got the strategy right but the implementation is
| laughable, sorry :-)))
|
| The implementation is: "We have a budget of N story
| points this sprint to resolve bugs, let's prioritize
| them. Let's prioritize by impacted audience size."
|
| The audience size will make 99% of Firefox specific bugs
| be deprioritized out of the current sprint. And the next
| one. And the one after that.
|
| And unless a senior engineer stands up to update the
| prioritization criteria, plausible deniability forever.
| close04 wrote:
| The aim was to lay out at which level each stage happens.
| It's not middle management taking a random decision. The
| fish rots from the head but the tail certainly doesn't
| smell rosy either. Dieselgate was also just a random
| deprioritized code bug until it wasn't.
|
| Repeated incompetence from one level is actual
| maliciousness from the level above, all the way to the
| top.
| nikanj wrote:
| They want two things: 1) Firefox needs to exists as a
| hypothetical option 2) People shouldn't really use Firefox.
| Intermittent oopsies breaking key services are doing
| wonders towards goal #2
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Google is currently facing an antitrust suit where their
| payment to Firefox is a crucial part of the evidence
| against them. And it's over their search engine, which is
| far more important to them than Chrome.
|
| They pay Firefox as they're buying a valuable product.
| Which is why they also pay Safari.
| Fatnino wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| Chrome is okish for collecting data. But they have
| Android which probably provides 100x the data.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Only on poor people! (I mostly jest, but having talked to
| a bunch of former Google ad people, it was a real concern
| for them that most of their high revenue users were
| moving to iPhone).
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Nope, search ads are still where they make at least
| 2/3rds of their money. The rest of their ad inventory has
| substitutes, search really doesn't (because they
| basically invented the category (grumble grumble
| something Overture)).
| aragilar wrote:
| It does seem unlikely, but playing with the example UA in
| curl (as noted in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38925015) seems to
| show it's the combination of "Android" and "Firefox" that
| causes this behaviour. I wonder if any other mobile
| browsers are broken?
| kevincox wrote:
| A far more likely explanation is simply that two features
| or workarounds are enabled, maybe "Android" triggers a
| prompt to install Chrome or something and "Firefox"
| triggers some workaround code. However these interact
| poorly and cause a crash.
|
| If they wanted to sabotage Firefox I doubt they would
| choose to send a blank page. They would probably send
| infinite captchas or just disable most features (which
| they already do).
| fsflover wrote:
| Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years
| (2019) (zdnet.com)
|
| 304 points by hashhar 49 days ago | 122 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357
| m45t3r wrote:
| The title is bad, this only affects Firefox mobile that AFAIK
| has a really low amount of users (BTW, I am one of them).
|
| Not saying that they shouldn't have detected this (i.e.:
| where is the automated testing for those things?), but I
| don't think this is Google screwing up Firefox on purpose.
|
| And if Google really wanted to screw up Firefox, they would
| probably do a better job than User-Agent sniffing. Firefox
| already has an internal list where it applies fixes for
| websites (e.g.: setting a custom User-Agent), and the bug
| report actually comes from it. You can see it by going to
| `about:compat` page in Firefox.
| jchw wrote:
| I get why people want to assume bad faith but it's pointless,
| it's hard to intentionally sabotage Firefox when nobody tests
| shit in Firefox at Google. There's (or at least was) still an
| internal group of Firefox users a few years ago, but it's
| small, and internal tools may have poor or no support for
| Firefox at any given time. When I worked there I made some
| attempts to fix things (e.g. once Google Cloud was
| accidentally broken on Firefox during a time when many people
| were out...) but the bigger problem is that most people don't
| use Firefox because it's inconvenient or they don't care to
| and a lot of the tooling only works on Chrome/only works well
| on Chrome.
|
| There's a silver lining though: it really doesn't matter if
| it's due to negligence or malicious sabotage, and if they
| (where "they" is hypothetical leadership within Google that
| is trying to eliminate Firefox) thought that pleading
| negligence instead of sabotage was going to be a good
| defense, we'll see how that holds up to future scrutiny and
| regulation. I mean hey, Microsoft tried to pull a lot of shit
| too, and they were probably more competent at it if the Epic
| Games lawsuit is any indicator of Google's competence right
| now.
| lopis wrote:
| To me, the fact they don't run automated checks on Firefox
| is in itself malicious and anti-competitive.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Yes, deciding not to test in Firefox is a decision to
| break Firefox. Sites with a tiny fraction of Google's
| resources manage to test Firefox. There's no way they
| just forgot.
| yunohn wrote:
| Google isn't sitting around randomly breaking things for
| Firefox users in this obvious way.
|
| I really feel like HNers often forget how minuscule the scale
| of their usage patterns are.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Google doesn't need to intentionally break things, they
| just have to not test on anything but Chrome and say "oops"
| once a critical mass of complaints come in. Now you could
| say that they don't have to support the competitor, which
| is fair, but the web is based on standards, and in this
| case the site breaks based on the user agent and not the
| lack of some technical capability.
| yard2010 wrote:
| How convenient!
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 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)
| MCUmaster wrote:
| It's pretty clear to others. Chrome is supposed to be The
| Web in the same way that Google is search.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Antitrust is just money to pay for Google. Firefox is
| cancer to Google.
| generic92034 wrote:
| I do not know it that is true. Cancer tends to grow... ;)
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| well played, well played :)
| bayindirh wrote:
| The thing about "high quality malice" is it's
| indistinguishable from an error.
|
| A bug that breaks others' tools but not yours is not
| implemented intentionally, but it's not fixed
| intentionally, so it looks like a benign error.
|
| At the end of the day, you use the chance you get, and it
| makes real damage while you sip your coffee...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| That's just sabotage with extra plausible deniability.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Is it "sabotage" when you don't intentionally devote
| resources to making some random third party's browser
| work? What obligation do they have?
|
| Mozilla has cachet with nerds like us because of its
| history. Not because it's particularly better than
| alternatives or because it has enough of a user base to
| throw its weight around.
|
| In contrast, they _do_ test on Safari. They 'd lose
| double-digit percentages of users if they didn't.
|
| The ecosystem, unfortunately, generally has room for
| three top browsers. I'm not even sure Firefox is number
| four these days.
| autoexec wrote:
| Except that firefox is particularly better than
| alternatives. It isn't sending my browsing history to
| Google, and actually lets me block ads. Firefox provides
| a level of customization and options to protect your
| privacy that chrome will never match.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > It isn't sending my browsing history to Google
|
| For obvious reasons, I don't think Google is devoting any
| resources to optimizing the experience of navigating to
| google.com for people who don't want any history
| generated on their use of google.com.
|
| I agree with you that the other features listed are
| positives, but they don't appear to be positive enough to
| push use of Firefox psst Safari, Chrome, or Edge numbers.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Our bad reputation is not entirely undeserved, some of us are
| not as well behaved as others.
| politelemon wrote:
| It's one of those occasional intersections where we are
| reminded that our reputation within HN comments does not
| reflect the outside world.
| msp26 wrote:
| Well someone did just write "'now you have two problems'
| b-bazinga. Software engineering is hard."
|
| I don't blame them for the lock.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ... We have a bad fame.
|
| HN is too orange.
| Andrex wrote:
| I switched it to the same color gray as the background. HN
| actually provides a pref for this in your user settings.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| A perk for gaining a certain amount of karma.
| Andrex wrote:
| Really? Huh. I've been here 13 years and I'm still
| learning new things.
| hartator wrote:
| Mozilla elitism.
| jraph wrote:
| Or experience with the internet?
|
| Of course outrageous GitHub issues get low quality comments
| from HN.
|
| The guy probably reacted like this because of the dummy
| comment he marked as off topic and probably made the
| connection.
|
| > 'now you have two problems' b-bazinga. Software engineering
| is hard.
|
| He might have said the same of Reddit, or any social network.
| It's pretty reasonable and I think he made the right call.
| denschub wrote:
| You are 100% correct in your assumptions. This isn't my
| first incident, and it won't be my last. As much as some
| folks here want to call me an asshole for that, we have a
| very good understanding of how this ends if we don't lock
| comments.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| FWIW, good on you for managing the signal responsibly.
|
| I have to smirk a bit every time I see the public do this
| to themselves. The public: "Why are companies never
| honest? Why is press-release-speak such a space-alien way
| of communicating?" Also the public: _reacts like this
| when someone takes a simple, clear action and explains it
| directly._
|
| (And yes, I know I'm guilty of broad-strokes reasoning
| lumping everyone in as "the public" and
| anthropomorphizing that entity. In this context, doesn't
| matter. Only takes a few bad actors to wreck the signal).
| latexr wrote:
| Locking the issue after it has been posted to _any_ large
| community is the right call.
|
| The respectful users will look at the thread and not comment to
| not derail the discussion. The fraction of a percent which may
| have something relevant to contribute probably already did or
| will find another way to do so if it's important.
|
| The remaining users will post low quality comments for a while
| then leave forever. Like a flash mob that invades your home,
| parties for a few hours, then leaves a mess for the regulars to
| clean up.
|
| Can't blame the owner for preemptively locking the door.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Orange site bad" is a bit of a meme. I even heard it IRL at a
| hacker space in the last few weeks.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > This bugtracker is a work place, not a discussion forum.
|
| that's actually an excellent way to frame what a bugtracker is
| actually for.
|
| it is about workers getting shit done and its optimized for the
| people who work the issues.
|
| it isn't optimized for the people posting comments on issues.
|
| and the fact that a lot of users that have never had to deal
| with fixing software bugs think it looks like a forum website
| would explain the impedance mismatch that you often see.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > it is about workers getting shit done and its optimized for
| the people who work the issues.
|
| The above phrase also explains why Social Media is not a bug-
| tracker. ^_^
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sadly, it seems to be the only bug tracker or method of
| getting issues noticed by the tech firms with the issues.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > We have a bad fame.
|
| But not one undeserved.
| wharvle wrote:
| N-Gate summaries were harsh, but fair. Basically spot on.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > This bugtracker is a work place, not a discussion forum.
|
| Well, tradeoffs and whatnot with hosting your bugtracker on the
| most open code platform on the Web.
| "Conversation limited to contributors until popular site calms
| down"
| lagniappe wrote:
| at least it wasn't a testicle in an egg cup like that other
| site
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Google partners with Mozilla to deliver a completely ad-free
| search experience.
| donny2018 wrote:
| Which, coincidentally, happens to be search-free as well.
| dylan604 wrote:
| which in turn makes it sound like free money from Googs
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| straight to the mozilla ceo
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Great screenshot
|
| https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16a554571b3cea973d2b73464...
| kreeben wrote:
| Definitely one of the greatest screenshots that I've ever seen.
| Jenk wrote:
| I didn't expect to laugh but the screenshot (i.e., pure white
| rectangle) has tickled me.
| genevra wrote:
| I wonder how this made it past testing?
| ale42 wrote:
| They test on version 64 ;)
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Test written according to behaviour?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Or fewer than 20,000 bugs.
| _flux wrote:
| Testing can never prove something works, only that something
| doesn't.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Funny that it works when switching to desktop mode.
|
| I never actually looked at what this does.
| andirk wrote:
| 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.whatismyscreenresolution.org/
| rendaw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Track you in new and exciting ways.
| PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
| Google provides a more basic webpage for older browsers.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Introducing 'about: blank' by Google. A new way to experience
| the web.
| djbusby wrote:
| Will be shuttered in less than 5 years.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| such optimism!
| Aissen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wow, that's very anticompetitive.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| No. But you might be misguided if you are incompetent to do it
| right, with incremental enhancement based on available
| features/resources.
|
| But then you will also be incompetent to do it right with UA
| sniffing, which is even harder and require more maintenance to
| keep the list up-to-date.
|
| That's the obtuse thought process on how you get the garbage
| google just showed us.
| acdha wrote:
| This level of condescension isn't helpful, especially as
| you're wrong to make such an absolute assertion rather than
| describing the right or wrong reasons to use a tool.
|
| UA sniffing should be a last resort but there have been times
| where browsers have claimed to support something but had hard
| to detect bugs and the cleanest way to handle it was to
| pretend the feature detection failed on those older browsers.
|
| This is increasingly rare - the last time I had to do it was
| for Internet Explorer - but I would not take a bet that
| nobody will ever have a need for it again.
|
| As an example, I recently had to deal with an exception to a
| TLS 1.2 requirement because while almost all of our traffic
| is from modern user agents, there was a group of blind users
| with braille displays using Android KitKat which defaults to
| only supporting a maximum of TLS 1.1 and "go buy an expensive
| new device" isn't an appropriate response even though you
| might be entirely comfortable saying that random internet
| crawlers getting an error is okay.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| You proved my (overly condescending) point.
|
| You either support older TLS or you don't. Do not try to
| fine tune it to one known audience. You just locked
| everyone that is not in the sample you just whitelisted(!)
| out of your service. But you don't know about them, so no
| harm? If you think one use case for tls1.1 is OK for one
| use case, just accept you support it.
|
| Same for every thing else. Every time you use UA sniff, you
| are doing it wrong. not matter how smart you think you are.
| You are not. It's just a momentary feel good because you
| are oblivious to everything else. Just like you felt good
| when you blocked tls1.1 before knowing of those blind
| users. Now you felt good allowing those blind users because
| you still don't know about another group that you might
| learn tomorrow or never, because you are blocking them :)
| acdha wrote:
| That not proving anything other than that you missed the
| point that the real world doesn't always have simple
| solutions. Sometimes you have to do things which are a
| bit messy as part of a phased transition and it's
| important to know what tools you have available to do so.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| Detecting the user's OS to provide the right binary download
| link?
| suprfsat wrote:
| Google Earth still asks me to choose "64 bit .deb (For
| Debian/Ubuntu)" or "64 bit .rpm (For Fedora/openSUSE)", but I
| guess user agent sniffing wouldn't help that.
| RulerOf wrote:
| There've been a few, but the first one that impacted me was
| Chrome's switch to requiring the SameSite=None flag on Set-
| Cookie headers[1] in a third party context.
|
| > Warning: A number of older versions of browsers including
| Chrome, Safari, and UC browser are incompatible with the new
| None attribute and may ignore or restrict the cookie.
|
| This caveat meant that UA sniffing was the only reliable means
| of setting cookies that were guaranteed to work properly.
|
| 1: https://web.dev/articles/samesite-cookies-explained
| scott_w wrote:
| We've seen browsers behave differently in subtle ways. To
| mitigate impact while we figured out the correct fix, we've
| served different content to them so those users still get a
| working experience while we figure out and fix the underlying
| issue.
|
| This had nothing to do with feature detection, so the usual
| suggestions simply won't work.
| dathinab wrote:
| yesn't
|
| basically you can send slightly less data by only sending the
| relevant layout/js code etc. with the first request instead of
| sending some variation which then the browser selects/branches
| one
|
| most likely a terrible optimization for most sides maybe not
| google search due to how much it's called
|
| but then Google is (as far as I remember) also the company
| which has tried to push the removal of UA strings (by fixating
| all UA strings to the same string, or at least a small set of
| strings)... so quite ironic
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| One notable thing about the Google search homepage is how fast
| it is. It's gob smackingly quick. It responds to the initial
| key press under in under 200ms with 10 suggestions that include
| text and pictures, and keeps doing it. My round trip time to
| www.google.com is around 20ms, so at least 100ms of that time
| is swallowed by the internet.
|
| You don't get that sort of speed without heavy optimisation. In
| fact I'd be amazed if www.google.com isn't the most heavily
| optimised page on the internet. So it's not at all surprising
| to me that they optimise based on what browser is asking.
| rudasn wrote:
| Google search doesn't even work on mobile anymore with javascript
| disabled.
| kramerger wrote:
| Key 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 <!DOCTYPE html>%
|
| and it seems that this affects all UA strings with versions >=
| 65. <=64 work."
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Specifically, Firefox Mobile.
|
| Whatever UA string Firefox Mobile sends in desktop mode
| returned fine.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And w3schools!
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| 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, but I'd like something I
| can import into my own settings to use.
| jorams wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You mean this page ?
| https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
|
| The top 7 blocked domain are just pinterest.
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| Yes, like that but I'd like to be able for people to
| share here is my list of blocks, here is my list of
| lowers, etc.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I think bingchat is more likely to be what eventually
| supplants google. They funded the ai that created the garbage
| autogen pages, now they can use more ai to solve it for you
| in exchange for the low low price of your attention. Tesla
| will likely supplant google maps any day now when they
| release an offering. People pay tesla to drive cameras with
| computer vision around. Google has plenty of altitude and
| time to correct itself, but probably not as much as it thinks
| it does. It won't die but it might go dormant for a decade or
| more like MS.
|
| Edit: I'm not saying tesla is building a street view clone. I
| can't imagine they have the bandwidth for that. But the cars
| recognize construction, speed cameras, police cars, red
| lights, red light cameras, stop signs and read speed limit
| signs, which all gets sent back up in real time. They might
| have to pay to augment their traffic data until enough people
| without teslas start using the app.
| oblio wrote:
| > Tesla will likely supplant google maps any day now when
| they release an offering.
|
| An offering of what?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I never noticed because I never visit google.com, even when
| performing a google search. I expect that's common.
| anderber wrote:
| Keep in mind that Kagi uses Google Search API. The downfall of
| Google Search could hurt Kagi.
| kup0 wrote:
| I'm a Kagi user myself but I'm not going to extrapolate that to
| thinking that because _I use something_ that it points to the
| downfall of another product 's dominance.
|
| Just because a few techy or aware people use Kagi (or another
| alternative), is still a drop in the bucket of overall search
| engine choice
|
| Google search is still widely dominant, as much as we might not
| want it to be.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Firefox should just change its ua to not-chromium. We will all
| know what it means.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Oh, that's why the search wasn't working earlier - I blamed my
| phone/browser.
| awicz wrote:
| kagi.com
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Google deserves Mozilla to send them a UA identical to Chrome.
| Draiken wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you mean Kagi?
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You're right of course, supposed to be Kagi, I blame it on
| a lack of coffee.
| _jal wrote:
| > the killer Kagi feature is being able to
| uprank/downrank/pin/block domains
|
| Yes! This alone is worth the subscription to me.
|
| And I despise and avoid software subscriptions, Kagi is my
| third.
| bad_alloc wrote:
| For people who don't know them yet: use DDG bangs. For example
| "!m restaurant [citynmae]" will immediately bring you to Google
| maps, "!w chemistry" will open Wikipedia etc. Super easy and
| powerful :)
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Setting stuff up for that in any browser worth it's salt
| isn't too difficult, skipping the entire middleman of any
| search engine.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| But it's already set up for you in DDG, so why not use it?
|
| Aside from the fact it's another HTTP request, but these
| days on the majority of computers and connections, that's a
| trivial thing.
|
| I'll add that !aw to search the Arch Wiki and !aur to
| search the AUR are my two most favorite commands.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| > Aside from the fact it's another HTTP request
|
| You'd think DDG could avoid this via JavaScript if they
| wanted to. Might be better for privacy, if not for their
| usage stats.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > But it's already set up for you in DDG, so why not use
| it?
|
| Because if I wanna search Reddit, I'd prefer to have '!r'
| search directly within Reddit and not litter my browser
| history with tons of duckduckgo entries like this:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.c
| om%...
| dingnuts wrote:
| weird example considering just how bad Reddit's internal
| search is and always has been -- that's a site I've
| always preferred to search with an external search
| engine, be it Google, DDG, or Kagi lol
|
| doesn't hurt to have options! to each his own
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Best example I could come up with on-the-spot, because I
| already swapped out Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia on my
| Firefox install for native search engines, and needed to
| quickly generate search results from a DDG bang so I
| could show the accompanying history page. :P
| wharvle wrote:
| Years and years ago I'd configure this stuff in FF, but
| using DDG effectively auto-configures it for any browser,
| exactly the same, everywhere, all I have to do is set the
| default search engine. And it includes some that I do use
| but probably wouldn't have bothered to configure on my own.
| kevincox wrote:
| Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted and will sync your
| keyword bookmarks across all of your devices. Sure, you
| have to set them up but it seems worth it to get the ones
| that work for me, not whatever duck duck go thinks is
| popular.
| wharvle wrote:
| I've never wanted one and not found it in DDG, or found
| it named differently from what I'd have named it. Every
| now and then I try to guess one blind, and I don't think
| I've ever had it surprise me. And it works in any
| browser.
| kevincox wrote:
| I guess you are the perfectly average human then. I am
| not so lucky.
|
| I have `s` to search sourcegraph.com, DDG has !sg. `t` to
| use Google Translate, DDG has !gt, `i` to search IMDB,
| DDG has !imd or !imdb, v to search animated images, DDG
| has !gif, `ni` to search nixpkgs issues which DDG doesn't
| have (although they do have one for the nix repo at !nr
| which is pretty impressive. I use `nc` for this). Not to
| mention personalized shortcuts like searching my
| company's GitHub organization or JIRA tickets that would
| never be a public bang, much less have a 2 character
| shortcut.
|
| I stopped there but it is clear to me that I benefit from
| making my own short aliases for the searches that I use
| most. Plus it is nice to not send my logs to a third
| party and get improved performance.
| eviks wrote:
| It's better to lose the inconvenient ! and use a browser that
| supports prefixes in the search bar
|
| Then you can "w chemistry" to open Wikipedia with a list of
| suggestions from the same Wikipedia ("Chemistry (Girls Aloud
| album)") in the same place
| rpdillon wrote:
| I think everyone in the thread knows about "search engines"
| in Chrome and bookmark keywords in Firefox. The crux of the
| issue is that there are more than 10,000 bang commands in
| DDG. Setting up even a popular subset in any given browser
| is a significant investment. It's fine if it's the browser
| you use 99% of the time, but for those spanning multiple
| computers, phones, and other devices, simply using bang
| commands is a strict win.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
| eviks wrote:
| 99% of the time you use <0.1% of the bangs, so setting
| those up isn't a significant investment. Then there are
| also the downsides mentioned above (less convenient, no
| preview, not portable across search engines), so no, it's
| not a strict win, but an inferior alternative which is
| superior only in those cases where you can't setup
| something better
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| 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 experience
| better
| wharvle wrote:
| Something this doesn't do that DDG bangs do, is let me
| append it, or even stick it in the middle of a search. I
| can just type it wherever my cursor happens to be, other
| than in the middle of a term. This comes up when I search
| something in DDG then change my mind and want to use a
| bang.
| eviks wrote:
| good point, and it's smart enough to ignore when quoted
|
| Wish they also allowed changing the !prefix
| focusedone wrote:
| DDG was great anyway, but discovering their !bangs was a
| revelation. Super cool stuff!
| amelius wrote:
| They should add bang-buttons at the top of their result
| pages. Didn't find what you were looking for? Just hit one
| of the bang buttons.
| WhackyIdeas wrote:
| Been using these !bangs for a while.. also works with bang!
| ravenstine wrote:
| Not necessarily everywhere, or at least not quite as bad as
| you're suggesting, in my experience.
|
| I used to advocate for DDG, but they've gone so far downhill
| that I rarely waste my time with it. They've decided to go PG-
| rated everywhere even if you have safe search turned off. This
| is a problem because, even if they just want to block porn or
| illegal things, this can have an impact on legitimate academic
| research. And yeah, SEO trash floats to the surface, though
| they aren't entirely in control of this.
|
| Kagi (which relies on Brave Search instead of Bing) has less
| flotsam to start with, provides lots of great tools to filter
| out the garbage, and is subscriber-driven instead of advertiser
| or investor driven.
|
| DDG had potential, but they decided to give into moral panic
| and coast on their modest success instead of making substantial
| improvements. They also decided to pull a Mozilla and spend
| unnecessary effort working on a browser when they should be
| focusing on their core product. It'd be one thing to make a
| browser if their core product was actually good, but the best
| they are offering is a pinky-swear that your searches are
| private.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Bing
|
| DDG works well enough for me to be my daily driver, but it's
| absolute garbage for any kind of news search. Bing
| prioritizes MSN repost spam from dubious sources, so I'm
| better off going just directly to news sites I trust.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I must be weird, because I very rarely search for news. I
| just go to the sites I trust.
|
| I think the only time I search for news (usually on Google)
| is to find a reliable article about a celebrity death.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| You can actually find this rather rapidly through
| Wikipedia.
|
| In fact, you can identify the exact moment when the news
| about the death leaked, when the first editor adds it to
| the article. Generally, experienced editors will keep it
| out until a reliable source is provided, which typically
| happens quite quickly.
|
| In fact I've found out about a number of celebrity
| deaths, just by having them on my watchlist.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > Kagi (which relies on Brave Search instead of Bing)
|
| This is misleading. Kagi uses multiple external sources
| including Google and Brave as well as their own internal
| indexes
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| ravenstine wrote:
| Ah, I was under the impression it was almost entirely the
| same as Brave. Thanks!
| JTbane wrote:
| Unfortunately I'm locked into gmail, migrating away from it
| would require days of effort and I would never be sure I moved
| everything.
|
| Also, YouTube is still the best video site despite going full
| mask-off on adblockers.
| hedora wrote:
| Fastmail -> settings -> migration -> import
|
| Then set up a gmail forwarding rule.
|
| The full documentation is here:
|
| https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-
| us/articles/360058752414-Mig...
| cobertos wrote:
| I migrated about 5 different Gmail accounts off of Gmail to
| FastMail and it wasn't too bad. Though it was at least a day
| of work across all of them.
|
| I honestly spent more time trying to wrangle the data in all
| of the other numerous Google services those accounts had data
| with.
| Draiken wrote:
| I am in a similar boat with an ages old Gmail account. My
| comment was originally intended to be only about Google
| search (I realize now I didn't specify that, lol), but
| leaving the entire ecosystem is definitely a lot harder...
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Well I was using firefox and google maps.
|
| Apple maps is Yelp spam.
|
| What should I be doing? I was doing research
| forward1 wrote:
| How is DDG "better" than Google? In my experience it serves
| almost identical results. And it's now served from Microsoft
| servers, so the argument "it's more private" doesn't really
| hold water anymore.
| Draiken wrote:
| They don't break their site for Firefox users for starters :)
|
| I do say this as somewhat of a joke, but that's for me a real
| reason. It's not the first time Google has intentionally
| screwed over Firefox users.
|
| Even if we believe what they say every time it happens: it's
| "just a bug". For me it clearly signals they simply don't
| care. And that's the best case scenario. Worst case they're
| abusing their market position to drive out competition.
|
| Even if DDG serves requests from MS servers, that's not even
| close to opting into the Google surveillance machine.
|
| Finally, if what you said holds true about serving basically
| the same content, then the hostility against Firefox and the
| fact that you won't be helping this monopoly should already
| make it "better".
| salil999 wrote:
| Why is this a reason to stop using Google?
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We're back to the internet explorer days!
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's literally older than Google
|
| Here's Raymond Chen sharing some of the worst examples from
| the 90s
|
| https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec.
| ..
| ziddoap wrote:
| 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...
| Thorrez wrote:
| Google is tracking the incident here:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| maybe not that easy if they use monorepos
| chx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mook wrote:
| > Next update will be within 12 hours.
|
| (From the status page linked above.)
|
| That sounds pretty far from being nimble and deploying
| rapidly. Not really a knock on the people doing the work
| -- doing stuff in high stress sucks. But it's clear that
| they're intentionally deprioritizing a competitor.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Only way to really test that is to break search for
| chrome and see how long that takes to rollback.
| KirinDave wrote:
| For one, that "deprioritize a competitor" is not clear at
| all. Why would that be so? Isn't it far more likely,
| given the rarity of these events, that a test regression
| occurred or some other subtle issue rather than assumed
| malfeasance?
|
| For two, that "next update in 12 hours" is user comms.
| For me, at least, google.com works fine both on curl and
| my browser. That's a fairly normal cadence for big
| companies.
|
| On the larger point about "nimble and deploying rapidly",
| the people who generally brag about "being nimble and
| deploying rapidly" almost never serve an even 1/100th the
| audience the size of Google.com does, and it's really
| questionable if, at that scale, you actually want to risk
| global regressions even on trivial bugs.
|
| So I don't know what that user is talking about, and I
| agree with you that they are obviously not that.
|
| That approach may be antithetical to the modern startup
| engineer frantic to prove their stock's hypothetical
| worth to their investors, unconcerned about trivial
| revenue loss from frontpage issues because of whatever
| latest node.js drama nuked their continuously deployed
| website. But the fact that "the landing search page is
| broken for 1% of users in a rare but public use case" is
| news at all is because Google's approach for search sets
| our expectations that this _won 't_ happen.
| chias wrote:
| I think the parent comment's point is: if this were
| affecting a version of Google-branded Chrome with similar
| market share, do you think we would still be getting
| "next update in 12 hours"?
|
| I remember an internal mantra in Google along the lines
| of "if you break something in production, roll back
| first, ask questions about how it happened later, even if
| you think it's a simple fix". It feels telling that this
| is not what is happening in this circumstance.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If it were Chrome, it'd never have gotten out the door
| because the developers writing the feature use Chrome.
|
| > if you break something in production, roll back first,
| ask questions about how it happened later, even if you
| think it's a simple fix
|
| I don't know that they have enough information on the
| breakage to know when to rollback to.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Nimble is on the order of a week, not on the order of
| hours at their scale.
|
| But it's also not on the order of quarters, is what I
| mean.
| KirinDave wrote:
| Google's strategy for search ux is decidedly not "nimble
| and rapid" and I don't understand why anyone with first
| hand knowledge would _ever_ suggest that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It is gated on a lot of things, especially relative to
| early days of the company. It's just that browser
| compatibility isn't generally one of those things... They
| still handle that by the belief they can roll back
| quickly.
|
| Relatively speaking, you can still undo the change to the
| front page faster than you can, say, roll out a new
| version of a desktop application, especially if the
| change fixes an active fire.
| kekub wrote:
| It appears that the problem is related to the version string
| transmitted by Firefox Mobile. If they were to send an older
| user agent string, the issue would likely be resolved.
| However, any rollback would need to be implemented by
| Firefox, and it seems they are not at fault here.
|
| From Google's standpoint, this issue may be considered a
| "new" bug, which means they need to conduct an investigation
| and address it. Consequently, a rollback is not a viable
| solution for them.
| rf15 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why would Google return an empty page based on _any_ UA string?
| This is such a bizarre bug.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I genuinely want to see a root cause blog post for this.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My favorite bug description.
|
| "The page is blank. The page is blank the page is blank."
| lopis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| One of those companies? Google pioneered this.
| forward1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >I ask you to carefully consider that responsibility in
| the hands of government bureaucrats, which are generally
| of low skill and intelligence,
|
| Bro you have posted this on an article where GOOGLE
| fucked up PARSING A USER AGENT STRING to the point they
| deliver an empty HTML document. What feature on the
| Google search page even NEEDS such feature switching
| based on user agent? Google search worked pretty well on
| internet explorer 4 for heavens sake
|
| But please, keep telling me how private sector is so much
| less incompetent than the public sector
| forward1 wrote:
| Virtually yelling and calling me "bro" doesn't form an
| argument for government intervention, but it seems to
| help you vent, so have at it.
| michaelt wrote:
| Back when competition law used to be enforced, if you used
| your ~90% market share in one area (such as PC operating
| systems) to give yourself an unfair advantage in another area
| (such as web browsers) the government forced you to stop
| doing that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Mi
| crosoft_Cor....
|
| If the laws were still being enforced, a company that has a
| very large market share in web browsers, and a very large
| market share in search, would have to be extremely careful
| not to "accidentally" break their competitors' products.
| robblbobbl wrote:
| Hilarious
| joelthelion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| forward1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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.
| forward1 wrote:
| > 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.
| rixthefox wrote:
| This is the wrong assumption to make. I can tell you as
| someone with a powerful rig that is by no stretch a
| "slouch" sitting at 0% CPU and 0% GPU I have seen Youtube
| act like garbage for absolutely no reason. I've even had
| video playback skip ahead a second as well and it throws
| me off when watching videos.
|
| > Get a faster computer
|
| or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to
| do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B"
| group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not
| happening. It only means Google is artificially putting
| their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with
| people handwaving issues with "get a better computer"
| Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has
| this issue, any other video platform does not do this so
| why is it only Youtube?
| ptek wrote:
| If it is a old video (3 days), just search for it in DDG,
| and just watch it via DDG.
| code_biologist wrote:
| This is not a solution that will work for mom and pop.
| Exactly the kind of workaround that relegates Firefox to
| being a "techies only" browser.
| Horpostiated wrote:
| Firefox's irrelevance is why it's regulated to techies.
| And sure, you're free to blame Google for some of that,
| but let's not pretend Mozilla has always been some
| wellspring of user-pleasing decision making.
| adamryman wrote:
| Firefox had 30% market share in 2011, the article links
| to the discussion about when google chrome first
| released. The article discusses how this behavior ate
| away at the market share every time google released
| something that worked on google chrome, and broken on
| firefox. And as a result over the years, now firefox has
| a 3% market share as you say.
| forward1 wrote:
| Firefox share declined because the market objectively
| decided Chrome is a better browser. Framing it as Chrome
| "picking" on Firefox is just silly. And I say this as a
| die-hard Firefox user and fan.
| stonogo wrote:
| You have no evidence to support this assertion. I know
| this because there is no objective "browser quality"
| standard. It is as least as likely that Google
| aggressively advertising it on every single page load of
| every single web presence gained traction for chrome.
| rcxdude wrote:
| This is about a pattern of behaviour that started when
| Chrome launched (and had less market share than Firefox)
| and has continued since then. This isn't "They're trying
| to take our tiny market share", this is "This is how they
| took our quite substantial market share".
| forward1 wrote:
| If they already took substantial market share, why would
| they need tofurther break Firefox users' experience? You
| just made my point for me.
| gkbrk wrote:
| > why would they need tofurther break Firefox users'
| experience
|
| To prevent the market share from going up? That's the
| logical thing to do after spending millions developing
| and marketing your browser to the number 1 spot.
|
| Why would they waste that money and effort by playing
| nice now and letting the market share go back up?
| forward1 wrote:
| Not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes users just
| prefer faster, better advertised, better supported
| software. To suggest Google is actively and wilfully
| interfering with <3% of browser market share is just so
| ridiculous, so foolish, it is actually amusing.
| acdha wrote:
| I don't think there's an official "sabotage Firefox" memo
| waiting to be subpoenaed. I think it's more along the lines
| of Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari, figuring
| that they save money and, probably never written down, any
| problems just make their browser look better.
|
| This keeps happening over and over for Google at a rate far
| in excess of other major tech companies so we know they don't
| make an effort to test with Firefox, and it's why I'd like
| regulators to force anyone making a browser used by more
| than, say, 100k people to be obligated to test in other
| browsers on every site their larger organization operates and
| have a maximum time to patch any compatibility or performance
| issue which isn't due to a browser not implementing a W3C
| standard. The goal would be to cover things like YouTube
| using the Chrome web component API for ages after the
| standard shipped and serving a slow polyfill to non-Chrome
| browsers.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Google only focusing QA on Chrome and Safari_
|
| FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively
| better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run
| Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari
| requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is
| automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on
| Safari, but they were slower and flakier.
| acdha wrote:
| So I guess my question would be where things were
| breaking down - Meet was almost unusable in Firefox for
| 2019-2021 (Slack, Teams, Zoom, Chime, and WebEx were all
| fine), and the GCP console login would periodically get
| into a login redirect loop only in Firefox on a regular
| basis for months. Our GCP rep never could get an answer
| on whether anyone was even aware of that problem.
| jefftk wrote:
| My guess is those paths didn't have automated tests, or
| the automated tests missed some important aspect of real-
| world usage? Issues engineers working on the product ran
| into were _way_ more likely to get fixed (among other
| things because reproducing the issue was easier) and
| almost all engineers primarily used Chrome.
|
| (Not defending; trying to give background.)
| acdha wrote:
| > Not defending; trying to give background
|
| I appreciate that - it's been really frustrating knowing
| how many good technical staff Google has and seeing
| things just not get fixed. Our GCP reps seemed resigned
| to this happening but didn't feel they had leverage to
| get attention on the product side, which made me feel bad
| for them.
| WhackyIdeas wrote:
| Considering it has happened time and time again, and this
| latest one happens just by changing the UA... yes.
|
| If it looks like a banana, shaped like a banana, feels like a
| banana, it's probably a banana (or a plantain).
| gkbrk wrote:
| Come on, don't sell Google short here. The previous one
| happened just by changing the UA too :)
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I work for Google Search. Apologies for this! It's been fixed now
| and posted to our search status dashboard
| https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i...
| jedahan wrote:
| Would love to hear what the bug and/or fix was
| stephenr wrote:
| I'm more interested in _why_ ua sniffing is considered
| acceptable for this.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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)
| Uptrenda wrote:
| It's ok, sure it's stressful when something like this happens.
| Software is a hard field and the amount of things that can go
| wrong is immense. When I think about how few errors and
| downtime some of the larger services have I realize how much
| work must be involved.
| code_biologist wrote:
| I'd divide "things going wrong" into forced and unforced
| errors. Your upstream service providers sending subtly
| malformed data is a forced error. It happens. Doing user
| agent sniffing for presentation, poorly, is an unforced
| error.
|
| It's not amateurish to have problems. It is amateurish (or
| malicious) to have problems caused by _this specific class_
| of issue.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Fortunately, the issue was reported in the proper / only place
| to get support from Google: the front page of Hacker News.
| rtsil wrote:
| Thank god for procrastination!
| emeril wrote:
| LOL
| dang wrote:
| Submitters: " _Please use the original title, unless it is
| misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._" -
| 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&so...
|
| (Submitted title was "Google breaks search for Firefox users
| because of bad UA string sniffing")
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