Google glitch?
I’m having a weird thing with Google right now. On my computer, it is working perfectly on Chrome, but when I try to do a Google search on Firefox, nothing happens.
Nada. Zip. Zilch. Sometimes the Google page itself (which is my home page) doesn’t even load. Meanwhile, for all other sites, Firefox is working perfectly and loading promptly.
So, is it just me, or is anyone else out there having a similar problem? Does anyone have a clue what might be going on? I certainly don’t.
UPDATE 5 PM: It’s all better—for now. But it’s happened several times before, although never this seriously. I still haven’t a clue why it’s happening and just affecting that one function.
I frequently have problems with Google things on non-Google browsers and such. Once, again, not to get paranoid, but I think its Google being deliberate and not just a glitch.
I seem to get completely different results between Duckduckgo and google with the latest version of Firefox (sample of 1). A lot of conservatives/libertarians have switched to Duckduckgo for reasons of privacy and censorship.
I use both DuckDuckGo and Brave.
I don’t use Firefox any longer, but I just opened it up to the google page and did a search with no problems. I have Windows 10 on a 6 year old laptop.
Yancey Ward:
My computer’s really old. Windows 7. I like it, though. But I wonder what would make Google searches impossible while everything else seems to load just fine.
Try Bing instead. It’s neither better (in search results) or worse, but might function better.
There was a story from ancient computer history that Microsoft made sure that many DOS apps would not run on their competitor’s system, DR-DOS.
Microsoft is hardly lily-white in their empire building, but I think they’re just better than those guys whose motto is “Be as evil as possible.”
Personally I treat google as I treat amazon, I don’t do business with them. To the maximum extent possible my money/support goes to keeping my money circulating inside Iowa. Switch to duckduckgo, boycott google. BTW, you need a new computer and one that treats microsoft like a dead skunk in your backyard.
parker, 6:41 pm — “Switch to duckduckgo, boycott google.”
Been doin’ ‘zackly that since early this year.
After that James Damore news came out, I’m surprised people with some political awareness are still using Google. I think most of these search engines pull up similar results these days.
I use Brave and Torch.
I use both chrome and firefox. For both of them I use duckduckgo as my default search engine. I like it and it doesn’t track and follow every little thing you do.
If you’re a FF user, you might want to try Pale Moon (a sort of minimalist fork of FF); that’s been my backup browser for several years. The default search engine on PM is DuckDuckGo btw.
…I have Chrome installed. I can’t recall the last time I actually used it, personally (I have quite a few clients who use it, so I have to be minimally conversant with it).
I prefer Edge (yeah, yeah, I know, sigh …but it steadily improves with each iteration, with occasional and inexplicable one-step-backs, and it’s really become quite usable over time), but that’s Windows 10 only.
Edge has had a similar glitch since the April 2018 [W10] upgrade. You’d open it (or click a link from Mail), and …nothin’. Blank page.
I got to where I’d just open the link and immediately exit Edge. Click again, and everything’s fine. Weird.
But weirder is that the problem seems to have vanished the past couple of days; all of a sudden, no problem again. (No MS updates or patches to explain “the fix”, either.)
In my more anthropomorphic moments, I’m semi-convinced it’s some kind of Person of Interest level AI out there that’s just screwing around with us.
I received a “denial of service” page trying to load Drudge a few minutes ago. To get out of the page I was forced to manually shut off the computer. Like Neo I am using Windows 7 and was browsing with Google. The computer was restarted in Safe Mode, shut down again, and then reopened. I am accessing Neo using Firefox now.
Are we getting a taste of the resistance?
Have had the same problem for days with Firefox. Been using DuckDuckGo
I use Duckduckgo and firefox. Firefox has an add-in that blocks facebook from getting information on your online habits.
I’ve been using Pale Moon ever since Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, and it’s a fine browser. I used to have occasional problems with it, but don’t recall any issues for the last couple years.
I also use Chrome quite a bit as well, but I use DuckDuckGo for searching.
I get it that Google is evil, but if I were to truly boycott every company that I believe does evil things, I would literally have to go live in a shack in the woods and dedicate my life to writing anti-technology screeds. That’s probably not feasible for a software developer.