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Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me: Since a while the documentation links to cs.opensource.google with the typical google flavor. Some years ago, you could simply click on some function in the documentation and view the source code. When I do this now, I find myself on a permission denied page. Just a random example:

Permission denied.

Please contact the administrator.

https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/go1.21.1:src/strings/cl...

I don't know what causes this, but is seems to be related to my Firefox, because in Chromium I can see that page. I just wonder, what on earth makes it so hard to serve a documentation in a way that is available to all browsers.

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For a counterpoint: I can see that page in Firefox. Probably related to some setting on your computer.

Are logged in to some google account?

I have faced the same problem numerous times. Sometimes the cs.opensource.google links work, sometimes they don't. I haven't yet bothered to try and understand why that's the case.

Why can't they use the github.com/golang/go link instead? (no pun, genuinely wondering)

1. github.com/golang.go is just a mirror. The main Git repo is available via https://go.googlesource.com/go

2. GitHub.com is Microsoft infrastructure. cs.opensource.google is Google infrastructure.

I still wonder why there is both cs.opensource.google and go.googlesource.com.

Because GitHub is a mirror not the actual repo, I think I was around 2015 when Go was gaining massive attraction they had to use GitHub for issues also, still you can’t change the fact that more than 70% of commits is from google

Do you have any privacy/ad-blocking extensions installed? I used to have the same issue and realized it was due to the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension. When I turn that extension's protections off for cs.opensource.google then it works.

It's source code. If we can't read it without privacy extensions, it doesn't work.

Even more: as reading on a machine that has the Go toolchain installed, this is source code that is already available on the local filesystem.

> If we can't read it without privacy extensions, it doesn't work.

What doesn't work?

Reading source code.

The same source code is also part of the Go distribution ($GOROOT/src). The Google source browser isn't the only place it's available.

Yes, you can find the documentation in other places and that is what I usually do, but it sucks because this is the official documentation of the programming language.

Having those links to quickly take a look at the implementation is what made this documentation so good.

1. I'm not always on a computer that has the go distribution

2. In that case, why allow reading the code un the browser ?

Well, yes I do use uBlock Origin as well as DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, but for that page I turned them off months ago. It still doesn't work :-/

Hey, DDG engineer here. Sorry about the issue, that’s super annoying. I want to get this fixed, but I’m having trouble reproducing the issue - navigating to the link in the parent comment seems to work as expected for me. Any chance you’d be willing to provide a few repro steps so I can track down what’s going on? Namely: - which browser you’re using and version - extension version - when it’s happening. Does it only happen when you click a link from another site?

Thanks so much for your time, and for sharing the issue.

Well, turns out I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue either. I just turned DDG Privacy Essentials back on for https://cs.opensource.google and I was able to view the site just fine.

Back when it was happening (maybe ~1 year ago?), I was using the latest versions of Firefox and DDG Privacy Essentials and it ocurred even if I went directly to https://cs.opensource.google. I had confirmed back then that when I turned DDG Privacy Essentials on I got "Permission denied", but with it off I was able to view the page.

I'm on the latest verisons of Firefox and DDG Privacy Essentials now. Seems it is no longer an issue in the latest version(s).

Thanks for following up! Appreciate it. We’ve been investing quite a bit of effort over the past few months into tracking down and understanding issues like this that are caused by our various privacy protections, so it’s nice to hear that things are improving.

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