When we picked that URL, the marketing site was created and run by the same people who built the rest of the product, so it didn't seem like a concern at the time.
(In Google Cloud you could do it entirely with load balancing rules, no need to even run a web server)
`curl -fsSL https://install.tailscale.com | sh` wouldn't be any less nice. Append /sh if having something human-friendly at the root is desirable (SEO, etc.), and you're still at the same overall length as today.
Even this isn't really necessary; curl includes a default user agent header identifying the traffic coming from curl. It's simple enough to direct traffic with the curl user agent header to the script and all other traffic to a static website with directions for how to quick-install.
* The user wants to read the script before executing it, and their preferred reader (perhaps due to browser extension or something) is a standard browser.
* The user has `curl` aliased to `curl-impersonate` in order to avoid things like Cloudflare's bot detection (a captcha that triggers on things beyond the HTTP request, like the less fancy TLS handshake of regular curl) -- https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate
* The user doesn't have curl installed, but has wget / lynx / some headless browser / etc. and expects any of those to work the same as curl.
Not to mention, if a site encouraged users to execute an HTTP response by piping curl into sh, and the response for curl was different than the response otherwise, that just might make the top of HN for being sketchy as hell.
I mean, the point of wanting to read the script before executing it is to try and protect yourself from malicious scripts that abuse the curl | sh pattern. So since it would be simple enough for a malicious actor to return something different when the user agent indicates the usage of curl, the only responsible thing to do, anyway, is to use curl to download the script to a file, read the file, then execute the file.
> `curl` aliased to `curl-impersonate`
So when the user uses a tool to impersonate a browser, they'll see exactly what they'll see in a browser... which are the quick-install instructions anyway, which can include a note about the user agent, if anyone actually hits this in the real world?
> wget / lynx / some headless browser
Which would provide the quick-install instructions to use curl :)
From an external perspective no one cares if www going down isn't "your fault" or of "direct impact to the product". It's a corporate blackeye either way.
Reminds me of the time marketing decided to change the logo on the marketing site for the product team I was on without being aware that the site was scraped and redeployed on a different domain (by hand). When the logo changed, the CSS for the image element wasn't updated, truncating part of the logo, proudly displaying the word "ass" as a part of the logo in an unfortunate cropping incident.
It's impossible to know because they won't admit it publicly. You are guessing based on some anecdotal experience.
But then again... here's mine! I worked at a very successful SaaS that had (really not kidding) the most incompetent, lazy dope running the www site. He live-edited a "staging" version of the site on the fly (no, it wasn't private, you could access this thing from the internet, and he didn't know or care about that). When he was happy with his changes he'd destroy the live instances behind the load balancer and clone his staging instance without taking it down or running any extra checks. This staging instance was around for years and I don't think he ever bothered doing a system update. Since he didn't use git, I I'll bet that at least once he cloned a live instance back to staging to undo a bunch of bork.
I lost count of the incidents. He never detected them himself, was never available to troubleshoot them and was generally a big "durrrr" when you'd finally get him on the call. Example: one time we had a "slow, intermittent errors" customer support ticket surfaced to us, not because it was our job, but because dopey was being an absolute ass to the helpdesk guys. He ran his crap in another AWS account we didn't have access to. About a day later the www site went down completely, so we got hold of the AWS account and dug in. All 5 of the instances behind the load balance were "unhealthy" for various reasons. Certs expired, disks full, apache stopped. We bounced them, restarted them and sshed in. They all had different versions of the site. It was a complete mess. Turns out dopey wasn't very good at killing the old instances and cloning staging. He was probably live-editing the instances for smaller changes if that seemed easier than a bunch of AWS console work.
Unbelievably he wasn't fired and continued to mismanage the site, and we could do nothing because the head of marketing didn't listen to the head of engineering. They hated each other. The way Marketing saw it "your SRE guys couldn't fix it, they had to wait for <dopey> to get on the call". I'm not even kidding.
Just more anecdotal evidence from me. You might be right.
† A systems architecture tightly coupled to the structure of the organization in which it was created.