How is that for a sensationalized title to grab your attention? I pondered to toss in as much wit as I could with a reference to “whose your daddy”, or perhaps just a succinct honest title, in the end, I went with a point proving one. In some ways, Mac users kick ass, in others, they do things that just make no sense to me.

Yes, the title is a misleading, and in this case, intentional. Let’s start with the background, so you can follow along, then we can move into the more specific details.

There is a 21 page thread over at the Apple discussion forums, Page not viewable in Safari. To the best of my knowledge, this hit the news sites two days ago, and piqued my curiosity enough to know it was something I could probably figure out. It was near 5AM when I read about it, and took until today for me to get into the meat of what was going on. *Forum has been locked by Apple.

Around November 24th, many users of GoDaddy.com’s “Domain Forwarding & Masking” feature, ended up with websites that were nothing more than a blank page. It is now the 8th of December, and why it took this long to get someone to figure out what was happening, that’s beyond me. Either way, enough people were experiencing it that it become newsworthy.

At about the time it became newsworthy, it also became a finger pointing issue. Mac users were strong in that it was a GoDaddy issue. GoDaddy was pretty firm in their stance it was an Apple issue. In both cases, all this finger pointing was going on based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence. For this, I blame the news sites for not doing any research whatsoever; linking to a forum post with a sensationalistic title on your “news” site is in no way news, let alone solid reporting. I also blame GoDaddy, for pushing a tech memo out to its support reps that had unarguably false data in it. I further blame their “Office of The President” for also spewing out false data based on no research at all. In this case, I do not really blame the Mac users, they are end users, all they know is that their sites are blank, and GoDaddy is the common thread.

I have done enough development that I know http headers and how they can sometimes bite you in the rear. The second I heard about this, I had a strong feeling it was GoDaddy in some way or another. I had no proof, so my next step was some tcp/ip watching. I posted my initial suspicions to the Apple message boards, and moved on with my day, to fully diagnose it later.

Without going into the technical details of what is happening, suffice to say, I do not think there is a network admin out there that would have any trouble pointing the finger at GoDaddy in this case. It is provable via telnet, tcpdump, RFC referencing, or any other number of standards based research.

So why the over amplified title to this post? Because, it took multiple weeks to get from finger pointing to a real answer. First, users of course report the issue to Apple via the send feedback form on Apple’s website. This, I assume, goes on for days, falling on deaf ears. Maybe Apple noticed it, but shame on them for not putting 10 minutes of engineering on it and setting the record straight.

And who do we shame next? GoDaddy. They are large enough it is to be expected they also have a network engineer capable of figuring out why. The fix may not be easy for them, but to put out a official tech note with real tech details is not asking too much. Instead, they go with seemingly logical assumptions that end up being completely wrong.

Since a recent update from Apple fell within this window of trouble, GoDaddy asks users to contact Apple. And there we are back at the infinite loop, so to speak. GoDaddy’s first and primary screw up was deploying a network change and not testing it in more than one browser, period. All technical issues aside, that is the largest issue at hand. Networks are a pain in the butt, so let’s allow them some slippage and move on.

Of the multiple email replies from GoDaddy support, none of them are even close. For humor, here is just a small sampling:

Thank you for contacting customer support. We appreciate you taking the time to write us.

The immediate response to this issue is to clear the Safari browser cache and reconnect. This solves 99% of the problems you described. From reseach on the Apple Support discussion boards, an issue with has been identified as a buggy Java update from Apple (J2SE 5.0) for Mac OS X 10.4.3. The only known workaround is to revert back to J2SE 1.4.2. Once that is done, Safari and Opera correctly resolve and forward domains.

Sincerely,

GoDaddy.com
Customer Service Representative

And yet another unacceptable reply:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting customer support. Unfortunately the error referred to is currently a known error with Saffari. You will need to contact Apple support for further resolution to this matter as Go Daddy cannot assist you in this matter further.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.

Sincerely,

GoDaddy.com
Customer Service Representative

I love this one, gets me all hot and bothered:

Thank you for contacting customer support.

I apologize for the inconvenience regarding this issue, because the site can be viewed in multiple browsers we can not further troubleshoot this issue.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.

Learn more about our Shared, Virtual-Dedicated, and Dedicated hosting: Click here

Sincerely,

GoDaddy.com
Customer Service Representative

Of course, there are more, all of equal tone, all of which 100% of the time point the blame at Apple. This angered the Mac users, so they get a digg.com post going. The title of the post? GoDaddy.com Hates Mac Users. In some regards, I almost feel this is warranted, you reach a frustration point. It’s very much like a real relationship, cheat on me once, I may forgive you, do it again, and I am going to call you a whore to the whole town. This only screws me more, as now the whole town knows where the easy meat is at. It does not make the cheater look bad, it makes me look bad, bitter and hot headed.

As the press picks up on this more, with these exceedingly harsh cover titles, and no real research behind them, those not in the Mac camp, look at the entire Mac base as bitter and hot headed. In the end, diplomatic efforts will win more points for the Macintosh user base than a few weeks of flame wars ever will.

At this point, I had pretty much had it with the whole issue, no one was dealing with it how it should be dealt with. Currently, as I type this, there is still no official response from Apple or GoDaddy, and that is unacceptable. To satisfy my own desire to know what was going on, and see if my suspicions were correct, off to the wonderful OpenDarwin Bugzilla I went. This is what is so great about the guts of Safari being public, you can, and will, get rapid answers from those who can look into this sort of problem.

I want to stress, this is not an official Apple response on the matter, but it comes from sources that certainly are not in the habit of making anecdotal guesses when troubleshooting bugs.

This is not a bug in WebKit.

There’s a bug on the server side, and I’ve been in contact with GoDaddy getting it fixed.

There’s also a problem where CFNetwork is not as tolerant of incorrect redirects as some other libraries. That’s also going to get fixed, but it’s not part of WebKit.

Closing as INVALID since this is not a WebKit bug.

And no, this is not an “official response” from Apple.

Settled, I am happy with that, now, someone officially and publicly make a tech note on this and let’s all move on!

The whole ordeal just hit slashdot. GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera, and if you take the time, you too can find out the “why” in regards to this issue, that however, is no longer important to me.

The Apple discussion mentions that this is related not so much to GoDaddy, but in that it is a problem with a vendors hardware. This is such a cop out, and deserves some discussion. Said hardware is within the GoDaddy network, so vendor problem or not, it is a GoDaddy problem, and to point the finger at yet another party is being insanely retarded. I am guessing GoDaddy makes some pretty serious coin, if that is true, this is an issue of paying to have it fixed. Fly someone in, do what it takes. Were this happening to Windows Internet Explorer, they would, Safari, they won’t.

Safari holds it’s own very well in usage reports. I would link to a few but they are all over the board. A good average is that Safari accounts for 2.78% of the internet, third place. FireFox gets 8.84%. Now, consider that Macs occupy less than 5% of the internet users, and that 2.78% is significant. GoDaddy clearly does not consider it a serious issue. I am sure they will fix it, but there are certainly other issues they care about more at this time.

And while that is somewhat anecdotal, GoDaddy has been a thorn in my side for other reasons as well. What many of you do not know, is when you buy a domain name, there is a good chance you are buying it from GoDaddy and do not realize it. They have an affiliate program that allows anyone, for a small fee, to look just like any other registrar or hosting provider. I use the system, and as a result, have reported two bugs to them, both of which were ignored.

Any of the menus on their site, or an affiliate site, are not accessible with the current version of Safari. It makes it near impossible for Mac users to even buy something from them. Second, some of the SSL certificates they sell are not known by Safari, and cause an alert in Safari to pop up about the certificates authenticity. For this reason, I do not resell their SSL certs. In regards to the SSL certs, a tech did know about it, and suggested I just dismiss the alert. I am sure Apple would be happy to add the cert to their known chain of trusted certs were they to even ask. I am guessing, since this is now going on over a year old issue, they simply have not asked. Of course, there is the other option, fix the problem on their end.

Clearly, the blank web pages are the fault of a bug in GoDaddy’s system. From a developers perspective, they are out of spec, and need to fix the problem. Apple should not move a finger to work this out, Apple has followed the spec, and GoDaddy has not. From a marketers perspective, Apple should release a patch and work around the bug, and introduce a non compliant browser to the world. From a users perspective, anyone that can step up to the plate to fix it, should, no matter what course of action is chosen. Users just want people to get to their website.

I am in the developer camp, sit on it, let GoDaddy rot away in stupidity. Trouble is, in the end, people need to get to websites, currently, most Safari users can not. This just continues to make the Mac look inferior to those now in the know. One way or another, this needs fixing, and should take hours, not weeks. Taking weeks to prove it, test case it, and get sensationalized news is unacceptable.

In the end, what does make me happy about this, is that Mac users are not part of generation @retarded, the meager 2.78% of us, managed to make enough noise, to get this noticed on a large scale. I may not agree with the in-between parts of getting to that scale, but I am happy to be part of a passionate group of users who do not just accept clicking “OK” to 25 warnings when your computer boots up.