YJL

I was trying to get a sunrise time in Google Search in Elinks, and I saw a countdown which I have never seen in Firefox.

Initially, I thought Google might take the browsers into account, I even tried to look into HTML because I thought it might be some reason the countdown wasn’t shown in Firefox, but still present the HTML code. Turned out, it’s not, simply not there as you can see below:

<!-- in Firefox -->
<div data-hveid="28">
  <div class="vk_cxp vk_gy vk_sh card-section _bEg">
    <div>
      <div class="vk_bk vk_ans"> 5:20 AM </div>
      Sunrise in London, UK
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

<!-- in Elink -->
<table cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td rowspan="2" style="padding-right: 3px">
      <img height="40" src="/images/icons/onebox/weather_sunrise-40.gif" style="margin-right:3px;margin-top: -2px" width="40" border="0">
   </td>
    <td class="r">
      <b>5:20am</b> Thursday (BST) - <b>Sunrise</b> in London, UK</td>
    </tr>
  <tr>
    <td style="vertical-align: top">7 hours 30 minutes from now</td>
  </tr>
</table>

For some reason I had yet to find out, Google provides more detail in Elinks than in Firefox, day, timezone, and countdown. That countdown is a very nice feature to have, it’s simple nothing technical, but helpful to know how long until the sun rises. I couldn’t help to wonder how come no one — meaning Googlers — never think about it? But apparently someone did, or it wouldn’t be what I saw in Elinks.

Beside the [sunrise] query, I also noticed the difference [weather]:

But it actually has nothing to do with user agents, but JavaScript. Finally, I recalled my build of Elinks does not come with an engine. It took me a few minutes and a search to realize how to disable JavaScript in Firefox, it used to be in Preferences dialog if I recall correctly, now it can only be changed with the javascript.enabled in about:config page.

After I disabled it, the same result was shown:

Now the reason is revealed, guess googlers never turned off their JavaScript, so no one got the chance to see what it could be. But I am pretty sure they were the older versions, with sidebar, until these new layouts took over.

I don’t know who designed these two versions, they got different layouts and even their own sets of images. Frankly, I think it’s not a good thing if the reason is to emphasize “JavaScript,” because it took me a while to realize the cause. They should be just the same, or at least, as similar as possible, and certainly, not two sets of images.

Personally, I like the JavaScript-off [sunrise] and JavaScript-on [weather], though there is one thing bother me a lot about the weather forecast, why is there no dates? I want dates, not just days of week.