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GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera
zackmac writes "For over two weeks domain registrar GoDaddy has been serving blank pages to Safari and Opera users who attempt to access sites using its domain forwarding and masking service. GoDaddy is blaming Apple as the source of the problem, and with nowhere to turn, Mac users are flocking to Apple's support forums to discuss the issue in-depth. Apple has so far been unresponsive and GoDaddy has directed affected customers to contact Apple Support. An inconvienent workaround is to open the website first in Firefox or Internet Explorer and then the page will load in Safari or Opera. Speculation abounds as to the cause of the problem and how to fix it. The current belief is malformed headers, an invalid 302 header with a bogus location and a redirect loop."
I just put my wife's photography site online yesterday, and it's hosted via domain masking/redirection from godaddy. Anyone with Oprah or Safari have trouble getting to it?
http://www.photosparks.com/
The last update that I'm aware of on this browser was Nov. 29, but from what I've read of TFA and some of the user comments, they're not related. I spoke to a friend of mine at work today about this who is an avid Safari user and he said his work computer has the problem but his home computer does not.
I would almost definitely relate this to a malformed header problem as the summary states... Xserv
"I love lamp."
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily /?ABCDEFGH
< Location:
> GET /?ABCDEFGH HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
< Location: /
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 200 OK
It appears that the page is redirecting and then redirecting back. I can imagine that would confuse some browsers. Especially if the browser cached the first redirect and didn't actually fetch the same exact page a second time.
There is probably something in the http spec about not caching temporary redirects. In fact not caching them makes perfect sense to me. So safari has a bug of some sort with redirect caching.
However, what the server is doing seems to be fairly brain dead as well. Why would you redirect away and then redirect back? It appears that there is not cookie set between the two. The server must be remembering your IP address and serving you actual content on the second hit from that IP Address. That would certainly explain the "teaching issue" that causes safari to work with these sites after visiting with firefox.
The only explanation that I can come up with is that somebody discovered this obscure caching bug in safari and built a system to expose it. It seems that the blank page problem would be easy to fix in either safari or the web server.
This is not a bug but a feature in Safari. Internet Explorer and Firefox will display http://www.stealyourpassword.com/paypal as http://www.paypal.com/ while Safari will show it's true address. It's to avoid forwarding addresses that are spoofed.
The problem with the 302 response is not the relative URL in the Location: header, it's the lack of blank line after the headers. The RFC requires this and Safari's network stack doesn't (yet) support tolerance of this quirk.
GoDaddy's founder, Bob Parsons, apparently loves the idea of torture. Bleah. Using them is kind of like giving money to the Chinese government. I think spending money at more socially conscientious companies is a better idea.
Send this post to your vendor: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170621&cid=142 16183
;)
Or, rephrase it nicely. Trust me on this one. I only spent 30s on this analysis, but I'm arrogant^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexperienced enough to know I'm right.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I actually heard a year ago that many people dropped Godaddy, because they were serving different/incorrect/empty pages ...
.... good chance that they do not see crap, and your godaddy site goes down the loo...
to crawlers and people's sites were dropping from SE indexes like crazy
dunno, never used them, but since those conplaints by many I did not want to go with them...
Now it makes me wonder what googlebot, msnbot, yahoo and other members of the artificial gang see from these 302/404/no source sites
Godaddy has a long history of screwing their customers over. They prematurely shut down domains and demand renewals way early of their expiration. They hold peoples' domains hostage in very inappropriate ways. They've implemented sleazy redirects and hidden frames and webbots; they use misleading advertising practices to hook users in with seemingly cheap prices and then nickle and dime them to death. Godaddy is THE WORST registrar on the Internet. And I do NOT work for them nor their competitors, but I advise all my clients to NEVER do business with them. They are a total and complete nightmare. I cringe when I come across someone who is foolish enough to use them as a registrar because I know it will make my and the client's life miserable at one point or another. It's inevitable. If it hasn't happened to you, it will. It's as certain as death and taxes. Godaddy sucks.
When I contacted godaddy support last week about one of my domains not forwarding using safari, they said it was safari's fault and that I could clear the cache and it would work. I responded by saying that the cache clearing didn't work and that I thought they should be more concerned that such a large percentage of people weren't redirected properly. They ended the "support" thread by saying that I just need to clear the cache AND reboot... and since that should fix it, it wasn't really a problem.
I wish I would have kept the emails now seeing as this made slashdot. They were really quite amusing.
It isn't Sun, I know I shouldn't be saying this and if I get cought I can get sued, thanks to stupid contracts. Microsoft develops the software for us at GoDaddy, they seemingly did this to make other browsers look broken to regain some of their lost sharemarket. I plan on quiting from GoDaddy when my next paycheck comes, along with some of my friends that are fed up with management.