Security News > 2024 > January > Google Search bug shows blank page in Firefox for Android
Users of the Firefox browser for Android have been reporting that they are seeing a blank page when trying to load the main Google Search site.
A report of the issue on GitHub confirms that the problem is reproducible on Firefox Mobile 121.0 for Android 13 and additional tests indicate the same behavior on Firfox Nightly 123 and all versions starting v65.
The bug seems to be specific to Firefox since testing on Chrome for Android did not reveal an issue.
According to Dennis Schubert, a Mozilla engineer who works on finding Firefox bugs and compatibility problems, behind the odd behavior is a server-side problem relating to the User-Agent sniffing system, which serves an empty HTML document to Firefox Android User-Agents with versions greater than or equal to 65.
Disabling the Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox allows a cookie banner to appear, but accepting it does not get rid of the blank page.
Temporary solutions for Firefox users on Android include using a different browser or considering using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo until Google fixes the problem.