2y ago

Mull (Firefox Fork) doesn't load Google.com. Switching useragent to Chrome "solves the issue"

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Today, I noticed that Google wasn't loading on Mull (Firefox Fork). Switching useragent with the extension Chameleon makes the page load again.

31 comments

maybe just dont use google
- Yeah but it's more complicated than that. Do you think the average user that for some reason uses Firefox will try to find out why his Google page isn't working? Last year Google was fined €2.5b due to unfair competition. This is not the first time, Google probably makes a lot of people switch doing these things. The top post of Lemmy is about Google turning itself into spyware and this just shows just how thats accurate.
  
  I think the average Firefox user won't be using anything Google (other than YouTube, but even then it'll probably be through alternative frontends).
  
  I honestly think more people are willing to switch than you think
- Completely, if op really needs to maybe use whoogle or startpage (there is some debate on if they are private or not since they were bought by system1, more info about it https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/ )
  
  I use startpage and according to privacy guides its private
Duck.com
Much better results and faster
- DDG is just a Bing frontend. Using SearXNG is mostly better since you can get results from multiple sources.
- Since a few months ago I get so many AI generated blog articles as top results with ddg (a lot with google as well, but less so)
- I have a really hard time getting good local/region specific results for products, I mostly get US or UK results which are utterly useless to me since I'm not located either places. I've tried all sorts of shenanigans to limit the search to my area/country but it's not really effective.
Something something anti-trust?
- Unlikely
It loads googles consent page for me. I got a blank page at first but I had to temporarily allow google connections in ublock origin to get it to load
Heh. I was skeptical this was true fired up mull and sure enough still displaying nothing.
It seems to be fixed now:
https://status.search.google.com/incidents/hySMmncEDZ7Xpaf9i32C
And so it begins.
I noticed this today, too. I didnft know how long it'd been going on, since I haven't tried to visit a Google page in a couple of weeks.
Thank goodness for SearX. This will also absolutely drive up the amount I visit Bing.
Nice feature
I was wondering why I was getting a blank screen earlier
Yeah, that is sus...I just use !bang in duckduckgo though, and I get results even with Noscript and Ublock on...
!g some search
Works in Mull...but yeah google.com shows blank even with extensions turned off. Meh, I haven't been on Google in a long while now. Too many decent altermatives to care.
yep, it straight up doesn't load, what a shitshow

31 comments