Greasy Fork

Google introducing changes to search is breaking features.

Left image source:
https://0bin.net/paste/ajbqWpAY#6N-FD1VCsQYy6cb/jYF3C+CIPAORucqDiGO2o6GxLty
Right image source:
https://0bin.net/paste/rA1FGhYU#nF1l5XJVIWaqBTg9uXlAUJY2z35gm68TtE8pQ5HkOBR

Font kerning: suddenly left side spaces more wide, total strings are longer.
URL formatting: https in front of URIs

For context I use temporary containers:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/

Thus the "experiments" Google runs are more often visible to me before they roll them out.
Also some of the UI changes may not be final. It is tough to answer why they insist their site look random for different sessions.

Just informing you in case they push the changes forced and for everyone.

If you still have the cookies that go with this experiment, can you try this:
Go into the menu of this stylesheet (from stylus' popup window when you click it's icon in FF toolbar), enable "Change font" and paste arial,sans-serif in "font family". (I think I should make this the default instead of inherit which is a leftover of the early test with this option)
Does it change the kerning back to the expected behaviour?

If you have stylus "on change" option checked (at the bottom of the userstyle config popup) the change is immediate, if isn't checked you'll have to hit the save button.

I've read about "temporary containers" (or something like that), but from what I recall I thought it was something built into FF (I'm a chrome user).

For my test with google pages I use an incognito window where I load google search results from 20 different TLDs (.com, .be, .fr, .de, .co.uk, ...). That way I have much more chances to spot modifications when I test. Which has been a while now...

I never used the inherit to be honest and it was arial,sans-serif since our last conversation. Not sure what they really changed, but it might just be size? It definitely is Arial.

So I guess font size also has to be forced for headlines / summary? If you feel like though, I only make feature requests and always rate you green anways. Might as well mark it green in advance no matter the outcome. And yes you are correct, country specific rollout is a thing too. Sometimes had users from the South Americanas ask me about Youtube changes I've not seen before.

PS: Magnification in the example is always the same. Firefox doesn't change per tab, but per site. So all google tabs had the same level of zoom for this demonstration. Also note the prefix of https being there again.

I'll look in their css code if they use the font-kerning property. If they do, this is something that might be involved here.

If you know how to play with the devtools - I know it works in chrome - you might be able to see if a particular element is styled with that property. When the element is focused in the source code tab, I have a panel on the right that can display "computed" styles. It lists all the styles whose values is different from the default. That's where I could see the new font-family, font-size...

I'll take time to try to get the kind of display you have there. Is it one where arial is not the font used and you have to force it to arial. It will be easier to spot it if I know what to look for.

As for the TLDs, it's not always that specific changes are done for specific regions, but it's more for me to speed up the test. I fire up 20 tabs (not all at once) instead of resetting cookies 20 times to retest the same page.

I've seen the same modifications appearing on different TLDs on different tests (cookies erased). At first it's only on .co.uk, then on .de with .co.uk looking normal again.

I've found what they've done here. They are using letter-spacing: 0.5px; which explains all.
I'll play a bit with this and try to add a fix for this in the stylesheet.

[Edit]
I've found another variation with letter-spacing: 0.1px;. I've only spotted it by swapping between to tabs (same search results on 2 TLDs).

Thanks for figuring it out. Those kind of changes make me lose my mind until I see they really modified something. Besides I doubt what Google does is what Nicholas and Saunders had in mind, when they created this font decades ago. Our displays and screens get larger every couple of years, yet information density on websites is reduced further :)