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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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)).
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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."
And exactly where are the various QUALITY CONTROL testers that should've caught such a dead-simple problem like "This won't work with Google Search" before it ever happened in the first place?
This issue was caused by Google on their server-side, without any relation to a change in Firefox, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to yell at my Mozilla-colleague.
As a quality control technician, I have several tests, including checking against third party resources for compatibility.
If I were a web browser coder, making sure my software worked with the major websites of the internet would be the FIRST thing to test. I don't release until I know it works.
This exact same mindset is why I make the expensive stuff where I work, and nobody else.
I'm also not yelling. That you think text is yelling is quite something I'll never understand from anyone. Two capitalized words isn't yelling.
Nah, that's bullshit. If someone interacts with your team on whatever medium you go out of your way to be respectful and shouldn't act like stuck up, condescending neckbeards, whose presence is a gift to humanity. I run many open source repos myself and you can bet that when people take the trouble to interact with me I make it my mission to listen to what they say and treat them with respect. I don't expect them to act like robots and neither should you. The way you've all answered here makes me think that you're a bunch of code monkeys incapable of understanding that software is created for human beings and not machines.
>In this case it seems highly unlikely that anyone can add additional information that will allow a faster resolution
Heaven forbid. Sounds like Mozilla is a wonderful and fun place to work. Lmao.
>of disrupting our normal workflows, and taking attention away from fixing either the problem at hand
People aren't going to die if a few off-topic comments are posted. Holy fuck, what is wrong with you.
>To me that significantly outweighs the potential upside of leaving it open to "make people feel welcome".
That's exactly the problem. Acting like regular users have no worthwhile input is unbelievably out of touch and just plain insufferable. Maybe if you listened more to the user you could build a browser that wasn't such a piece of shit. Lmao.
> I run many open source repos myself and you can bet that when people take the trouble to interact with me I make it my mission to listen to what they say and treat them with respect.
Oh come on. As soon as any issue hits any "social media" site, the comments turn to shit with people inserting their own clever meme or whatever.
The bug is well understood, there's nothing to gain from keeping the issue open and a lot to lose. Getting notifications for "shit posts" is pretty annoying.
_Maybe_ they could have avoided explicitly calling out HN and just said "social media" or whatever. But you're really pulling at straws to get offended here. I don't think their an asshole, I think they're pragmatic.
A bit of searching suggests that this individual is the same 'robertsdotpm' who posted that "b-bazinga" comment, or at least is closely associated with them.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
How did you find out about the blind users? did your excellent testing work find it? No. You screwed up and someone complained.
Now extrapolate your arrogant incopetence to your entire user base. How many people do you think you are screwing over that didn't bother to complain and instead just moved away?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Wouldn't a 20 ms RTT mean 20 ms is swallowed by the Internet? As long as your 10 suggestions fit within the TCP receive window, you already have an active connection from the initial page load, so it's 1 RTT to get the data (you could put the images into data URIs so everything could be gathered in 1 fetch, right?). I'd expect the UI update to set a list of 10 items should also take way less time than a single frame. The 200 ms search seems impressive without me knowing much about what it needs to do, but the UI portion seems trivial?
"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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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"?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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:
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
None of the browsers I use across those devices sync settings well. Even if it was 100% firefox, I don't want to trust the cloud, and can't be bothered to set up a mozilla sync server just for this (I don't use bookmarks, and there aren't any other settings I want to sync).
Also, as it is, I make 100% of my experience better by switching all the browsers to a search engine that provides better results than google and has !bang support.
There are at least two such search engines: duck duck go and kagi.
> 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
- less convenient: Addressed by my comment.
- no preview: I do not want preview, so this is a bonus. It's also orthogonal, since if the search bar was configured to preview, it could also display bang results.
- not portable across search engines: It already works on all non-terrible search engines because they standardized the bangs.
Not addressed, Shift+1+w is less convenient than w, try to address that by your comment!
> I do not want preview, so this is a bonus.
Not a bonus since you can achieve the same natively, so again not better
> It's also orthogonal, since if the search bar was configured to preview, it could also display bang results.
No it couldn't? What's your preview link to DDG to show the results of a Wikipedia page for a given search term in the browser?
> - not portable across search engines: It already works on all non-terrible search engines because they standardized the bangs.
Since these don't exist (DDG is very similar to Google in search quality), it doesn't work. But this is personal, so if your needs are narrow enough to be covered just by DDG+Kagi, than you obviously don't need portability.
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.
I agree, it is nice and privacy respecting, but I take umbrige with the google-maps.
I am not really using Gmaps and I have everyone in my orbit exposed to alternatives.
Just because.... like cato used to say...... I believe that Google should be destroyed.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
"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?"
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?
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They're the only one (I can find) with "Mobile" inside the parens; bet you money the issue is a badly-formatted regex tripping over the paren / symbol combination and thinking that UA describes some deny-listed crawler somewhere (or falls off the end of recognizable UAs and trips a fallback to "Vend nothing").
Since they're always testing on Chrome Desktop, and Chrome Mobile emits an almost-identical UA string, my previous statement holds: issues with Chrome mobile are generally more likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop than issues in Firefox Mobile are likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop.
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.
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.
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.
Why would Firefox have to "rollback" their UA string back to version 64, released 6 years ago (2018)? That seems utterly ridiculous for a server side UA sniffing bug rolled out by the Google Search Team.
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.
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.
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).
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.
319 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadThis 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.
However wanted to screw Firefox users the same way as the YouTube slowdown.
Reverse search is now completely useless for example.
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).
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.
Interesting theory, but that's exactly what M$ got dinged for in the antitrust suit re: Netscape.
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.
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.
Assuming competence and intention is foolish.
> 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.
Repeated incompetence from one level is actual maliciousness from the level above, all the way to the top.
They pay Firefox as they're buying a valuable product. Which is why they also pay Safari.
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.
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).
304 points by hashhar 49 days ago | 122 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357
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.
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.
I really feel like HNers often forget how minuscule the scale of their usage patterns are.
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
And exactly where are the various QUALITY CONTROL testers that should've caught such a dead-simple problem like "This won't work with Google Search" before it ever happened in the first place?
If I were a web browser coder, making sure my software worked with the major websites of the internet would be the FIRST thing to test. I don't release until I know it works.
This exact same mindset is why I make the expensive stuff where I work, and nobody else.
I'm also not yelling. That you think text is yelling is quite something I'll never understand from anyone. Two capitalized words isn't yelling.
>In this case it seems highly unlikely that anyone can add additional information that will allow a faster resolution
Heaven forbid. Sounds like Mozilla is a wonderful and fun place to work. Lmao.
>of disrupting our normal workflows, and taking attention away from fixing either the problem at hand
People aren't going to die if a few off-topic comments are posted. Holy fuck, what is wrong with you.
>To me that significantly outweighs the potential upside of leaving it open to "make people feel welcome".
That's exactly the problem. Acting like regular users have no worthwhile input is unbelievably out of touch and just plain insufferable. Maybe if you listened more to the user you could build a browser that wasn't such a piece of shit. Lmao.
You clearly look like a very polite person /s
The bug is well understood, there's nothing to gain from keeping the issue open and a lot to lose. Getting notifications for "shit posts" is pretty annoying.
_Maybe_ they could have avoided explicitly calling out HN and just said "social media" or whatever. But you're really pulling at straws to get offended here. I don't think their an asshole, I think they're pragmatic.
People will upvote and downvote on this site as they please, and caring about it is a recipe for a bad time.
I don't blame them for the lock.
HN is too orange.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The above phrase also explains why Social Media is not a bug-tracker. ^_^
But not one undeserved.
Well, tradeoffs and whatnot with hosting your bugtracker on the most open code platform on the Web.
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16a554571b3cea973d2b73464...
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.
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.
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
I never actually looked at what this does.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+my+user+agent+string
https://www.whatismyscreenresolution.org/
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.
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.
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 :)
Now extrapolate your arrogant incopetence to your entire user base. How many people do you think you are screwing over that didn't bother to complain and instead just moved away?
> 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
This had nothing to do with feature detection, so the usual suggestions simply won’t work.
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
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.
"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."Whatever UA string Firefox Mobile sends in desktop mode returned fine.
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.
It has one killer feature: you can block Pinterest from spamming your results.
The top 7 blocked domain are just pinterest.
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.
An offering of what?
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.
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.
Just an evil company really.
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.
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"?
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...
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.
Yes! This alone is worth the subscription to me.
And I despise and avoid software subscriptions, Kagi is my third.
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.
You’d think DDG could avoid this via JavaScript if they wanted to. Might be better for privacy, if not for their usage stats.
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.com%...
doesn't hurt to have options! to each his own
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.
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
https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
I guess I could implement them as a web server, and point all my devices at it.
There is no point in making 100% of your experience worse just because you can't make 100% of your experience better
Also, as it is, I make 100% of my experience better by switching all the browsers to a search engine that provides better results than google and has !bang support.
There are at least two such search engines: duck duck go and kagi.
- less convenient: Addressed by my comment.
- no preview: I do not want preview, so this is a bonus. It's also orthogonal, since if the search bar was configured to preview, it could also display bang results.
- not portable across search engines: It already works on all non-terrible search engines because they standardized the bangs.
Not addressed, Shift+1+w is less convenient than w, try to address that by your comment!
> I do not want preview, so this is a bonus.
Not a bonus since you can achieve the same natively, so again not better
> It's also orthogonal, since if the search bar was configured to preview, it could also display bang results.
No it couldn't? What's your preview link to DDG to show the results of a Wikipedia page for a given search term in the browser?
> - not portable across search engines: It already works on all non-terrible search engines because they standardized the bangs.
Since these don't exist (DDG is very similar to Google in search quality), it doesn't work. But this is personal, so if your needs are narrow enough to be covered just by DDG+Kagi, than you obviously don't need portability.
Wish they also allowed changing the !prefix
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.
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.
I think the only time I search for news (usually on Google) is to find a reliable article about a celebrity death.
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.
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...
Also, YouTube is still the best video site despite going full mask-off on adblockers.
Then set up a gmail forwarding rule.
The full documentation is here:
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058752414-Mig...
I honestly spent more time trying to wrangle the data in all of the other numerous Google services those accounts had data with.
Apple maps is Yelp spam.
What should I be doing? I was doing research
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".
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?
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.
IIUC "Interventions" are typically injected scripts or styles and "SmartBlock Fixes" are exceptions to tracker blocking.
Here's Raymond Chen sharing some of the worst examples from the 90s
https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec...
"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...
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on this. This was linked from the Bugzilla bug.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
> 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.
To write the code? It was only mobile Firefox that was broken. I don't think most developers write code using mobile Chrome.
`Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36`
The UA for mobile Chrome looks like
`Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.6099.210 Mobile Safari/537.36`
There is very little here different that could twig an error in the google.com UA handler.
In contrast, the Firefox Mobile one is
`Mozilla/5.0 (Android 4.4; Mobile; rv:41.0) Gecko/41.0 Firefox/41.0`
They're the only one (I can find) with "Mobile" inside the parens; bet you money the issue is a badly-formatted regex tripping over the paren / symbol combination and thinking that UA describes some deny-listed crawler somewhere (or falls off the end of recognizable UAs and trips a fallback to "Vend nothing").
Since they're always testing on Chrome Desktop, and Chrome Mobile emits an almost-identical UA string, my previous statement holds: issues with Chrome mobile are generally more likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop than issues in Firefox Mobile are likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop.
But it's also not on the order of quarters, is what I mean.
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.
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.
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).
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