Oldskool Google search displayed in nightly

By +Heartripper
in Web Browser Discussion & Support

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+Heartripper Subscriber¹

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Hey, today i noticed that google loads in nightly the old-fashioned search in nightly. I tried with a new profile too. It doesn't happen in Aurora, nor in Chromium, nor in IE9.

Some screenshots:

err2.PNG

Also in the italian version the logo is loaded incorrectly:

err1.PNG

This things make me realize how bad looking the internet was in the past :)

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Orry Verducci

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Google often use cookies to set how the site should appear to you when they are testing stuff (for example if you get the new Google bar or not). In this case, it appears your Nightly has somehow got one to give you the old design, which must be some sort of error on Google's end. Nice to see though!

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+Heartripper Subscriber¹

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Google often use cookies to set how the site should appear to you when they are testing stuff (for example if you get the new Google bar or not). In this case, it appears your Nightly has somehow got one to give you the old design, which must be some sort of error on Google's end. Nice to see though!

I thought that too, but after deleting the cache and cookies nothing changed

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DudeBro

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I got the same problem in nightly but changing the user agent fixes it for me. In about:config add "general.useragent.override" and string value "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2" or whatever previous version of firefox.

Websites sometimes appear differently on other browsers and they detect that by sniffing the user agent. Try using iPad safari browser user agent and you can emulate googles iPad layout on firefox.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5

edit:

It appears that today's nightly changed user agent formatting. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588909

old nightly: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/20120217 Firefox/13.0a1

today's nightly: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/13.0a1 Firefox/13.0a1

This broke the google. So temp workaround is to manually change user agent or wait for google to fix it on their end.

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Japlabot

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The probably used that part of the useragent to detect if the rendering engine is modern enough for the standard design otherwise it will revert back to the old for compatibility reasons. The changing of the date format broke this backwards compatibility (Better to use dates than version numbers it would be simpler to do when Nightlies are involved which won't have a predictable version number)

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cork1958

Posted
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Hey, today i noticed that google loads in nightly the old-fashioned search in nightly. I tried with a new profile too. It doesn't happen in Aurora, nor in Chromium, nor in IE9.

Some screenshots:

err2.PNG

Also in the italian version the logo is loaded incorrectly:

err1.PNG

This things make me realize how bad looking the internet was in the past :)

How bad looking it was? What's bad about that? It's called simple and simplistic and it loaded very fast too, I bet, which is how I wish it still was instead of all the bloat/crap Google has on their page and in their browser!! I'm not complaining about the speed of Google loading, but if everyone was still using dial up, I'd bet there be more complaining about it then?

90% of the reason I WILL NOT use anything Google!! It IS NOT the greatest thing since the wheel, or internet!! Google sucks green donkey d**k!!

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+Heartripper Subscriber¹

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How bad looking it was? What's bad about that? It's called simple and simplistic and it loaded very fast too, I bet, which is how I wish it still was instead of all the bloat/crap Google has on their page and in their browser!! I'm not complaining about the speed of Google loading, but if everyone was still using dial up, I'd bet there be more complaining about it then?

Nowadays version is minimalistic and loads almost instantly.

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Kirkburn

Posted
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Just when you couldn't hate mozilla any more than you currently do.

They go and change this, which adds zero benefit but ****s every standard up.

Oh way to go...

What utter tosh. Why not actually read the bug ticket? UA strings are hardly a strict standard, as it is (and have a loooad of historical complexities around them). Sites should be feature sniffing, not browser sniffing. Do you have much experience with how UA strings work?

As it is, it's not going to stay broken/weird for long. Google is likely thinking the browser version is much older than it is.

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n_K

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"Sites should be feature sniffing, not browser sniffing. Do you have much experience with how UA strings work?"

Guess you've never been a web developer in your entire at all then.

Javascript comes with chome, firefox, etc. yes. A lot of browsers do not have javascript support (lynx, links, etc.), or have it disabled (no$cript).

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The_Decryptor Veteran

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This is just plain badly written code on Google's behalf, instead of checking for the version of the browser they check for the date it was compiled on, which is pretty damn meaningless (You could have a lower version with a higher build date, etc.) There's a reason Mozilla froze that date to be 2010-01-01 with 4.0, to discourage this, Google is just apparently slow to notice.

Edit: Ahh, I see the JS angle then. Still, your site shouldn't rely on JS to function and this is a server side issue on Google's behalf, not a client side issue.

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Kirkburn

Posted
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"Sites should be feature sniffing, not browser sniffing. Do you have much experience with how UA strings work?"

Guess you've never been a web developer in your entire at all then.

Javascript comes with chome, firefox, etc. yes. A lot of browsers do not have javascript support (lynx, links, etc.), or have it disabled (no$cript).

It's not an either/or situation, though - browsers inherently without JS support could still be UA detected. I don't have much sympathy for people who would noscript Google - of course you're going to lose features that way. Just like if I turn off CSS, sites will also look fairly weird - but I'm not going to complain about it. (Turn off the scripts you don't want to run, for sure, but turning off *all* scripts and expecting everything to be okay is over the top)

There's many articles online about browser and feature sniffing, and the benefits of each - but they pretty much always come down on feature sniffing. I know browser sniffing is commonly used, but that doesn't make it good.

Besides, that's not a defence of your original comment at all, which was that somehow it was all Mozilla's fault.

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