738871 - Intermittent 404 on https://www.google.com/m from the address bar (gfns=1)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Attachment: Screenshot of browsing history showing "Not Found" title

I received a 404 from Google after entering search keywords in the address bar and then hitting enter (not clicking on the Google search plugin) two or three times in the last day.  This is very possibly a server-side issue on Google's part but I'm not sure if this is related to the recent switch to HTTPS in bug 633773.  If this is common then it may be worth trying to work around this with a different URL for mobile.

Reproducible: a few times with unknown cause. The same URL works later.

Attached is a screenshot showing the browsing history from when I got the error and then the successful result following it when I deleted the "m" from the path to avoid the mobile site. Clicking the history entry hours later loaded the page successfully.

I don't have a screenshot of the error message at the moment but I'm fairly sure it wasn't Fennec UI.

I tried to reproduce this with many combinations of the following with no success:

Hardware: Asus Transformer TF101
Built from: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ab2ff3b5611f (and/or possibly the Nightly before)
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:14.0) Gecko/14.0 Firefox/14.0a1

Comment 1

[[Baboo]]

Indeed sporadic, in one instance even the start page https://www.google.com/m itself didn't load for me, next time it did.

Comment 2

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

(Quoting Matthew N. [:MattN] from comment #0)
> I tried to reproduce this with many combinations of the following with no
> success:
* With or without cookies
* While logged-in and out

I'm not sure that this is only happening on https.  Can someone confirm that this is not happening (as much) on HTTP?  You should be able to look through your Fennec history and see if the "Not Found" title appears on valid searches for HTTP.

Requesting tracking in case this is caused by bug 633773.