Google’s DNS vs OLD browsers..

I’ve never been that big on Netscape 3.0 but it does support HTTP 1.1 unlike say, IBM’s web browser, or so many old legacy things from the Windows 3.1/Win32s era.  So without thinking about it, I configured my OS/2 4.0 VM with the DNS server 8.8.8.8…

“The requested URL / was not found on this server”.. What the hell?

And no matter where I tried to go, this is what I got.  I don’t know what on earth it’s trying to do, but it’s certainly trying to pass me through google.  Is it some forceful way to see who’s using their services?  I know at some point they had some ‘browser acceleration’ feature that was a great way to get around corporate firewalls… But it’s long gone.

I’m not sure what was going on but I fixed it by simply changing my DNS to something like 4.2.2.4 and away it worked.

I know it’s largely useless, but if you wonder why older HTTP 1.0 stuff doesn’t work, and you are using Google’s public DNS scheme it could be this…. Or not. I don’t know.

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