Tuesday Feb 19 2008 - 5:58pm
Google Toolbar’s New 404 “Feature” Needs Work
by Zach
under google, programming, rant, web
with 5 comments
Techcrunch mentioned last week that Google’s Toolbar was going to start redirecting 404 pages to show a Google search box. Well, it looks like this “feature” shipped with a few bugs. Unfortunately, the redirection happens if a page fails OR if any of the iframes in the page fail to load. So pretend you are running ads from a server hosted at Rackspace and another truck crashes into their datacenter. If any of those ads are loaded through an iframe and return a 404, Toolbar will helpfully take over your entire page. Super fun! Even better, if you have the Dell branded IE, you get the horrible ad covered page seen below:
If you want to try this out yourself, here’s the HTML I used to get the screenshot above. Just toss in in a file and load it up on a browser with the toolbar:
<html> <head> <title>This is a test</title> </head> <body> This is a test of Google Toolbar's new 404 replacement "feature". <iframe src="http://asdfkljdfjkas.com"> In here is some stuff no one cares about. </iframe> Observe as Google's Toolbar "helpfully" redirects the enclosing page to a search page. </body> </html>
1
It lives!
2
This is another example of why I no longer use the google toolbar. As long as this “feature” stays out of the firefox embedded search, I’ll be happy.
What’s with everyone taking over the web anyway? 404’s to search pages, domain tasting, etc. ???
3
good,ken
4
it’s very strong@～
5
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