Google's Corporate Login | Hacker News Reader

Google's Corporate Login

45 pointstrengrj30 comments

It's basically what GMail used to look like:

http://www.tapeze.com/imagedir/GmailLogin.png

They just didn't spend money on updating the design of something that probably works perfectly fine.

I didn't realize I missed that version of the internet so much.

Outrageous. It brings back memories of sites that were simple, fully functional, light, and designed in a non-obnoxious way.

I assume this is in reference to the article about Google opening up their corporate tools/services to their users on the Internet, but I've seen this MOMA login page (at least what I call it) before last year and probably before that too. On that premise I assume @google.com users have been able to log in from the Internet for a while, anyone have some light to shed on what's recently changed? :)

It is the MOMA login page :) From my time at google (around 6 months ago), you can access this page for a lot of services, but some of them will be accessible only from the intranet (or if you login to a VPN from the internet). What has changed is the number of services that are now accessible from the internet.

Also, when I was working there, I could not remote into my desktop from my company laptop from my home without signing onto VPN. Not sure of that has changed, but they wished to phase out VPN completely.

for ssh, they use chrome ssh plugin and connect via ssh-over-http now. no vpn needed.

It's not not just MOMA, but any corporate website. The assumption of "oh, they're on the corp network, they must be a googler" has been removed.

One of the two JS files included is readable without any extra work.

Also this interesting HTML comment at the top of the page:

    <!--googleoff: all-->

That's just a special instruction to the Google 'Search Appliance' not to crawl the page contents.

Interesting. Unfortunately it's specifically for Google Search Appliance - not for the main Google web-search: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14314111/avoid-google-to-...

Could it be a special directive to Google Chrome?

Looking at the wayback machine, it seems that they used to use tool called UberProxy: https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/uberproxy/

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20130716091355/http://corp.google...

They still do.

I thought the entire corp subdomain was not publicly accessible...this is surprising.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9539372

Here's (one of) Microsoft's login pages (I've seen a buddy use something like this):

https://microsoft.sharepoint.com

That's for the developer network(if you are developing for X360 or XOne):

http://developer.xboxlive.com/en-US/Xbox/Pages/home.aspx

Looks very similar to outlook.com.

Deleted comment

eye roll

What is the purpose of a non-"web 1.0" login page? This is not to win customers; it's supposed to work. And for thousands and thousands of employees every day, this works just fine.

Agreed. I'm just surprised is all. I expected google to have bucked the corporate trend and have the "flying car" of login pages. I was wrong!

If it's an internal tool that works great but doesn't look beautiful, then what incentive is there to fix it? All you would end up doing is changing the design without adding new features. Maybe some internal company tools are scraping the DOM of that site, so they might actually break existing tools by redesigning. In any case, I don't see much technical debt here, and there isn't much to gain by redesigning.

Totally agreed! I'm not criticizing, I was just a little surprised because of Google's reputation as an innovator. I also totally expect corporate tools to be static for long periods of time, so I'm also not surprised based on overall trends.

You might be surprised at the amount of innovation that has happened on that very page.

As an example, I believe it was the first place that U2F was deployed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor

unfortunately, Google has lost that reputation.

If I recall correctly, web 2.0 was about user-generated content. The image on the right is likely the one.

If you think that's bad, you should see their public facing page.

Does anyone else find the random images creepy as fuck?

What's creepy about them? I don't know if this is still the case, but for many years the images on the corpsso login page were photos taken and shared by googlers. It was just for fun.

random images that are very SFW creep you out? =/

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