Google.com search now refusing to search for FF esr 128 without JavaScript
47 comments
·January 16, 2025inetknght
Stop using Google. Google has literally nothing but SEO spam and malware. Use DuckDuckGo or Kagi.
ronjouch
Google is currently the only search engine allowed to crawl Reddit, which sometimes yields good original user content of actual { non-blogspam, non-SEOed-to-hell, non-AI } value.
mastazi
All search engines include Reddit results by default and you can usually refine by adding some param like site:reddit.com which works the same in Google as in other search engines
e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=filter+coffee+site%3Areddit...
Edit: maybe you are thinking about the AI deal which is exclusive to Google. That's not the same thing as search engine indexing https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-reddit-60-million-deal-a...
ronjouch
> “Edit: maybe you are thinking about the AI deal which is exclusive to Google. That's not the same thing as search engine indexing.”
@mastazi that’s what I’m talking about, and I think your AI vs. indexing nuance is incorrect. I wasn’t sure, so I just did a quick N=1 verification: searching for the name of a random 1week-old popular Reddit post with a precise unique title,
- Insta-found it on Goog as top result
- Didn't find it on DDG, with or without site:reddit.com
Looks like sibling comment from @cpressland (thanks!) is correct: as of today and until other search engines sign licensing agreements with Reddit, “non-Google search engines cannot get new results from Reddit”. See https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt , which links to https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525... , section “Reddit may license public content for commercial or non-commercial use”
cpressland
While I couldn’t find a better document: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/search-engines/google-is... describes how non-Google search engines cannot get new results from Reddit.
null
cma
ChatGPT search isn't allowed to index reddit
taikahessu
Funny, that is indeed true, didn't know that.
null
jmclnx
I think google did this to force AI on us. Does not matter to me, I left google a year or 2 ago.
Makes me wonder about Google and AI, with my tin-foil hat on, I cannot help but think Google/AI searches your cache and cookies looking for info.
narmiouh
The way web applications work, there is domain separation of data (be it cache or cookies), so googles "AI" isn't going to be able to read data that it already didn't have access to before.
compootr
this wouldn't matter if the page itself was calling the AI thingamajig
varenc
This isn't making sense to me. Due to the same-origin policy, anything on google.com can only access the cookies and other application data stored there by google.com. Doesn't matter if it's JavaScript or an "AI", Google can't break the same-origin policy and read cookies from other domains. AI changes nothing about this.
(Google services' widespread use by 3rd party sites does give them more data, but they have that whether you load google.com with JS or not. And again, unclear how AI changes anything about what data is available to them.)
rafram
> Makes me wonder about Google and AI, with my tin-foil hat on, I cannot help but think Google/AI searches your cache and cookies looking for info.
This is nonsense. Any cached data or cookies that Google’s scripts have access to was saved by those same scripts. If any site’s “AI” (not sure what you mean by that) could search through objects cached by other sites, you’d have bigger problems.
ronjouch
Generally works for me with https://www.google.com/search?gbv=1&q=test with JS blocked at domain-level by uBlock Origin.
With the caveat that this used to 100% work, but since a couple months, it indeed occasionally redirects to the “Turn on JavaScript to keep searching” page you mention, https://www.google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs . I'd say the refusal happens 1 / 20 searches. Said differently, I’d prefix your “refusing” with a “sometimes”.
I haven’t investigated the reason for this sometimes-ness. Would love to find an answer here, or ideas/leads (aside switching to another search engine, yes I do know about them, but sometimes Google remains better). Or maybe the sometimes-ness was just A/B testing, and the full switch is happening and this is now a thing of the past.
EDIT you must have posted precisely at the moment of the end of the A/B test: I did several non-JS searches today at $job, and to confirm what I was writing here I did a test one, successfully. But 30min later, I confirm your observation: 100% blocked.
simonw
What's FF esr 128?
EDIT: Figured it out - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ca4ii3/what_is_fi... - it's "Firefox Extended Support Release" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cyc...
denkmoon
Firefox Extended Support Release version 128
null
NetworkPerson
Firefox extended service release
superkuh
Yep, sorry. The default browser for Debian Linux. I've also found it's blocking firefox forks like Palemoon 33. But really old browsers from the 2015 era don't get blocked (yet). User-agent spoofing does nothing.
HeatrayEnjoyer
How does it detect despite the user-agent?
superkuh
I was wrong. There are a few user-agents they still allow. Like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0"
denkmoon
Good time to get off google then!
rodarima
Same on Dillo, reloading makes the JS wall go away for now, but probably won't last.
Edit: Reloading doesn't work anymore for me. Unless the sca_esv=xxxxxxxxx param is present it will redirect to the JS wall.
relyks
Maybe try changing the user agent? I can use Google on my Kindle's web browser and that can barely handle Javascript (though the Kindle does do limited execution)
flaptrap
Other browsers, just an ad to use one of five other browsers, and incidentally use Javascript. Always use noscript to reduce the attack surface.
For the dyed-in-the-wool, lynx https://www.google.com, tab and type in test, tab and enter, Now how can I get lynx to remove the ad?
Startpage search on "Google requires Javascript" replies "Allow JavaScript in your browser - Google AdSense Help" - now isn't that special?
superkuh
I have tried spoofing the user agent. No effect. It seems to be if the browser is new enough then if JS is turned off it blocks you. But if you use a really old browser (~2015 Firefox) that doesn't support modern stuff it still allows non-JS search. I think they must have the server looking at HTTP header or fingerprinting or something. I don't think they could do the redirect based on CSS or HTML5 support without JS being run.
nicoburns
I believe they're doing a meta-tag redirect (possibly inside a noscript tag?) in at least some cases. Source: I'm developing a web engine that doesn't have JS support.
ronjouch
That's exactly what they are doing:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><title>Google Search</title>...</head>
<body>
<noscript>
<meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=..." http-equiv="refresh">
<div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=...">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div>
</noscript>...superkuh
You're correct.
<noscript><meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=a3qIZ42cGcvcp84P5p_mwQI" http-equiv="refresh"><style>table,div,span,p{display:none}</style><div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=a3qIZ42cGcvcp84P5p_mwQI">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div></noscript></header>Waterluvian
I think that lamenting the end of an era because Google doesn’t offer hyperlinked docs is like lamenting the end of fine dining because Olive Garden doesn’t offer cloth serviettes.
We’re looking in the wrong place if we want an ad company to be the champion of anything but revenue optimization.
throwaway290
I guess google is fed up with freeloader piggy backing. Requiring JS is going to break a bunch of LLM crawlers immediately
superkuh
It'll also break for a lot of of people with impaired vision and screen readers. Screen readers can't keep up with the insane development pace of JS and CSS and so people with impaired vision are going to be left behind. It's an accessibility nightmare.
drivebycomment
Google or most search engines work fine with screen readers with javascript enabled. I think your understanding of how web accessibility works is likely severely outdated. There's just too many websites that use JavaScript that it would be a disservice if web didn't support accessible interface for pages with javascript.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA
That said, as ARIA rule #1 says, it's better to not use javascript, as it's always less error prone. That doesn't mean websites shouldn't use javascript when they have reasons to do so, as long as they correctly follow ARIA.
duskwuff
This is a common myth.
Screen readers are not a type of web browser. They are software which interacts with other software running on the computer, including web browsers. There is nothing which inherently makes JS or CSS incompatible with screen readers.
inetknght
That doesn't make it a myth. There are plenty of screen readers that break directly because of shitty use of javascript.
throwaway290
Yep. There's a bazillion of accessible JS libraries. Just manage tabindex/aria attributes. Accessibility is about actual DOM not the html string returned from server.
JS gives the same improvements for screen readers as for everyone else especially with complex apps.
Bad JS of course ruins things as usual, same bad HTML with table layout or whatever. But that's not JS on google.com;)
superkuh
Two words: shadow dom. Now tell me how a reader is supposed to know what's what?
kccqzy
My understanding is that people with impaired vision use the regular browser and a layer on top of it, such as VoiceOver. They don't need a special version of website. And screen readers don't need to keep up with JS.
OhMeadhbh
Disappointing. DuckDuckGo seems to still work w/o JS enabled. But Bing also fails to do anything w/o JS. HN comments still seem to work, thankfully.
stepupmakeup
DuckDuckGo specifically offers JS-free frontends and Bing still works -- it's just their tracking redirect pages that require JS. Thankfully userscripts exist to deobfuscate the tracking URLs to plain ones on search results (as they're slightly more complex than Googles)
It just redirects everything to https://www.google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=... I guess this is the inevitable end of the era of the web as a collection of hyperlinked documents and the beginning of the web as an application delivery protocol.
In other browsers with JS disabled google search still works but this computational paywall rollout for Firefox esr is a sign of things to come.