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by KirinDave 898 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

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.

>the developers writing the feature use Chrome.

To write the code? It was only mobile Firefox that was broken. I don't think most developers write code using mobile Chrome.

The UA for Desktop Chrome looks like

`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.