(jolla browser) Sites that aren't working

What for? Why do do you care so much if there’s a link to a non-working site?

SITE
VR - Valtion rautatiet
https://vr.fi

WHAT IS IT
An online train ticket shop of the Finnish railroads company

WHAT DOES WORK
The front page loads just fine and one is able to set a place of departure and arrival.

WHAT DOES NOT
The browser crashes almost instantly, when one tries to modify the date of departure or the amount or type of passengers.

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SITE
https://natehoffelder.com/blog/google-no-longer-automatically-indexes-websites-wtf/

WHAT IS IT
A seemingly interesting blogpost I’d like to read. It was linked from Google no longer automatically indexes websites? | Hacker News

WHAT DOES WORK

  • Cloudflare loading animation

WHAT DOES NOT

  • Cloudflare ‘are you human’ check
  • I.e. the whole site is inaccessible

does also not work on Firefox / Linux laptop. I guess too much security until nothing more works as it should.

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SITE

WHAT IS IT
Company website for a well-known brand of laptop bags.

WHAT DOES WORK
The HTML appears to load, technically.

WHAT DOES NOT
Actually rendering the site, so it’s not usable to navigate or view the company’s products.

This is how it appears for me now, maybe someone might confirm:

SITE
https://blog.devops.dev/ssh-might-surprise-you-in-all-the-wrong-ways-a5926d11ff11?gi=c0ae66e2fde1

WHAT IS IT
A seemingly interesting blogpost I’d like to read.

WHAT DOES WORK
At first the page appears to load normally, …

WHAT DOES NOT
… but then a moment later the content disappears, leaving only a blank page.

SITE

WHAT IS IT
A seemingly interesting article I’d like to read.

WHAT DOES WORK
Cloudflare loading animation

WHAT DOES NOT
Cloudflare ‘are you human’ check
I.e. the whole site is inaccessible

I would like to repeat my previous request for this thread:

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SITE:
Facebook dot com

EDIT:
After having deleted the browser cache it works again

WHAT IS IT:
World’s most famous social media

WHAT WORKS:
Everything, but in the last few weeks it has become so damn slow, it’s pratically not working. All in all it’s a real pain to use

WHAT DOES NOT:
As already described, it has become so damn slower it’s pratically unusable, it can take also more than 20 seconds to load a page, and it doesn’t even remember last paga as going back always return to the homepage

I guess facebook changed something to force you to use the app or update your browser, as the site is exactly the same as when it was working

Surprisingly enough, despite being still slow, the desktop version is a little bit faster

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WHAT IS IT
A site with example texts for putting on e.g. greeting cards.

WHAT DOES WORK
Nothing

WHAT DOES NOT

403 User Agent Denied
Your client or browser version is being used to send malformed or invalid requests. Please update your browser if possible

Sure, the browser does adapt or “spoof” user agent for many websites. But an active block by some fringe website, is that really for this thread? (As opposed to complaining to them…)

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Seems fine here.  

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Before someone says that, yes, these sites may have been badly designed but they work perfectly in firefox mobile and even epiphany on pc, so yes, it’s just the default jolla browser being bad or too old :stuck_out_tongue:

Emphasis mine, so ‘yes’?

Also I don’t see why it should matter if it is a fringe website, and its debatable if this even is a fringe site, help/advice for writing a postcard seems pretty mainstream to me. Not to mention that this site is probably part of a larger network of similar sites and/or using some common framework, so this represents a larger body of sites than just this one.

What is the goal of this topic? Are we not trying to put some pressure on Jolla to please give their 3+ year out-of-date firefox fork a much needed update?

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I disagree with that the premise that it is the only real source of problems.
And in your case it is particularly clear that it is not the case.

There are more or less 3 classes of problems:

  1. Actual incompatibilities from the browser being old
  2. Incompatibilities with that the embedding/reshaping/stylesheets is not quite like other mobile browsers
  3. User-agent stuff
    3a. There is a good mobile mode, but our user agent is not recognized so the server does not send it
    3b. The server is silly and just blocks us for no good reason

Of course these problem areas can overlap and aren’t mutually exclusive. However, i think it is a safe bet to assume that a majority of pages will have just one problem (or at least needs only one solution). Given that the other 99% has 0…

I’d say the error message you are seeing seems very much like 3b. It mentions requests; and they really have nothing at all to do with rendering compatibility.

And why does that matter? You can update the browser all you want ans still have problems left of types 2 and 3. A new browser engine is not a magic catch-all solution (unfortunately).

Perhaps partly… But i read this thread as asking for fixes for problem types 2 and 3.

…or maybe that was wishful thinking on my end, thinking that people were informed and reasonable.

2 Likes

I disagree with that the premise that it is the only real source of problems.

Sorry, what is “it” here? What do you think is not the only source of problems? The age of the browser?
You later say that “You can update the browser all you want ans still have problems left”. Yes, that is true, but isn’t the converse also true? Any fix or solution made even for type 2 or 3 needs an update of the browser before it is available to users?

I’d say the error message you are seeing seems very much like 3b. It mentions requests; and they really have nothing at all to do with rendering compatibility.

So you are specifically talking about only my last message/reported site, right? Previous examples fall more clearly in your categories 1 and 2.

However, from the perspective of a “casual user” I really don’t care for the technical reason that a site doesn’t work. If it works on pretty much everything else but not on my phone, then the problem is with the phone. I know that is may not be technically true, and you may not like it, but that is the practical truth.

Yes, the age of the browser. Your unattributed quote that turned out to be the first post.
There has been several type 2 and 3 fixes made.

No, basically not at all. (Clarification: update of the sailfish-browser, yes - update of the browser engine from version 78, no).
Think about it; if these sites work in Firefox 78 on anything else, that is by definition not true.

Yes.
But i’d not be so sure all other problems are unique to this browser. There may well be a less problematic mobile mode available, that we just fail to get in to (i.e. type 3 solution).

That’s borderline calling it alternative facts or rejecting science.
There is definitely limit on how much garbage a browser should need to deal with (not that i think that is what is at play here).
But let’s spin that around; say you do get a browser engine update and it does diddly-squat, how does that help the casual user?

Don’t get me wrong; i want a browser update as much as the next person. But that’s more out of principle and safety. Attributing all and any problems to it however, is not productive.

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(emphasis mine) Yes, that is also what I meant.

What kind of test is that? You’re intentionally crippling your competition in order to appear less bad. Do you also want to run this test on a Pentium II running Windows 98 from a 5400RPM hard disk and 16 megabytes of SDRAM? No, of course not, because that is not the realistic case that we are comparing against.

The point that I was trying to make is that if I sit down on my, or any other, relatively-recent relatively-up-to-date PC, running whatever OS and whatever browser, all of these sites will (almost certainly) work just fine. I.e. if I log on to a windows PC and open Edge and navigate to any of these sites, it will work. If I use an apple computer and open Safari, it will work. Even if I venture into my local hacker’s den and operate one of their Linux machines with Firefox it will work. I can ask for anyone of my friends phones, and it will work (this is very often good for a few laughs on my behalf when Sailfish lets me down once again). It will work on most any tablet. It will work on my TV’s built-in browser. If I had one of those fancy refrigerators with a built-in browser it would work on that.

To your point, yes, sure, I agree. I don’t care how it is fixed, so long as it is fixed, and this being Jolla’s custom browser, the onus is on them to fix it. If they don’t want to maintain it then they should just have shipped plain Firefox in the first place. (we would have gotten plugin/adblock support as a bonus).

You really don’t want to understand, do you?
The reason it is “custom” is because no plain-linux mobile-usable, or even readily embeddable version of Firefox exists. There is no “plain Firefox” to ship.

I must admit i don’t follow the tirade you went on with making competition look bad and whatnot; but these two statements contradict each other:

First you care, then you don’t. (And that was my point all along - either understand what you ask for, or don’t be needlessly specific)

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This will devolve into an argument with no clear right or wrong, but let’s dive in a little bit. There are already at least two mobile versions of Firefox, one for android, and one for iOS. Before that there was Fennec, which a last build was made for maemo/meego in 2016. Firefox is an open-source project, and there was no-one stopping Jolla from taking any of these versions and adapting them for Sailfish (except that that probably the former two use a wholly different UI toolkit). Fennec would probably have been the best choice since it already ran on maemo/meego.

If they had continued with Fennec, everybody (i.e. other open-mobile-OS communities) would have benefitted, and could have worked together on a usable mobile browser. Fennec would very likely be part of official Mozilla suite of browsers still if it was being actively used and developed. So then I ask you, why did they not ship with Fennec (“firefox”) but made their own fork instead?

Somehow having a half-way decent browser is still an unsolved problem for everyone except Android and iOS, and instead of working together we have all this fragmentation, the sailfish browser being just another example. Later there was the Epiphany mobile version which is based on webkit. That would also have been a good choice to adopt rather than “roll your own”.

Sailfish is also not a “plain linux”, i.e. the Sailfish browser is using the custom/proprietary silica components.

You wanted to compare against Firefox 78 on other platforms, but that is not an honest comparison because everybody else is running an up-to-date version of Firefox / other browser.

They don’t contradict? I was making a suggestion (I do believe part of the problem is the age of the browser) in #1, but ultimately I don’t really care how they fix it. I don’t believe they will be able to fix many problems if they don’t update to a more recent version, after all there is 3 years of new features and bug fixes there, but perhaps they want to spend the next 3 years re-implementing that on their own? I don’t care as long as it works, but it doesn’t seem like a good investment of resources to me.

It’s not really a fork. It is uplifting/retrofitting/maintaining an old embedding layer for Qt that used to exist.
Taking the Fennec bindings and bringing that forward would have exactly the same type of issues.
And most probably building along with the Android java bindings, but in some sensible language, isn’t too different either.

What basis, or even line of reasoning brings you to believe this would help?

It is not like Qt embed bindings are unhelpful to others either.

Right, but not to say that what fails on desktop ESR 78 is fine that it fails here, if that is what you are thinking.
I’m saying that what works on desktop ESR 78 probably has a solution in modes 2 or 3 most likely, and might not even be helped in the slightest by an uplift.

I have now tested to update the user agent for 1001mooieteksten.nl; none of the existing compatibility ones work, but pretending to be an Iphone does. They are beyond silly to do this.

That’s what the test with desktop ESR78 will tell you. I’m pretty sure it will handle a majority of what’s reported here just dandy.

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