trouble with github.com

[kencu]

Sadly, github seems to be giving me trouble with TFF-FPR8 (as well as Firefox versions 46 and 52) as of this morning.

The "recent activity" ball spins endlessly, recent commits can't be shown, and the commit buttons don't seem to function correctly.

The banner bar shows a new "incompatible with Firefox version" bar.

This one is painful :>

[kencu]

Goodish news -- changing the user age to 60ESR(Intel) works to fix it!

[classilla]

It also works if set to 52ESR, which is probably more appropriate.

There are two possible solutions:

• Use the same workaround for Imgur for Github (no user agent, unless the user explicitly specifies one). I don't know if this will work.
• Change the base UA to 52. I'm a little resistant to doing this because we don't support everything in 52, though we support a fair bit. For example, no CSS grid.

[kencu]

I should also say that with this github change, TFF on Intel is now my only fully functional browser on 10.6.8. So good for us all for making it work!

[kencu]

@rmottola !

[classilla]

Currently typing this in a build that suppresses user agent on any github.com page using the workaround from #422. So far seems to work fine, so I'll commit this for next beta.

[rmottola]

@kencu you summon me :)

GitHub is a "pain" and now that it is Microsoft I suppose it will be even harder on non-mainstream browsers.

I'm a bit back with TFF - if you remember I still have issues on 10.5, hoped some input for you. I wanted also work with you in GCC.

As you write, it might become one of the main browsers! We are near it

I did try GitHub on FF 49 "official" and apart from getting the warning about unsupported site, it works though.. so maybe there is a specific issue of TFF?

(I will make an update to our intel repository in the meanwhile).

[kencu]

did try GitHub on FF 49 "official" and apart from getting the warning about unsupported site, it works though.. so maybe there is a specific issue of TFF?

The way it looked to me, GitHub changed something to make older FF versions not work, and then changed it back again a day later -- FF 45.9.0ESR works again I notice. I think perhaps they were testing it?

Anyway, when this happens, you can pretty much assume the change is coming.

[classilla]

I didn't really notice, though I do most of my work from the command line. But if you see those problems again, please report anything interesting the Browser Console. Maybe it's just some DOM support that needs being added.

Meanwhile, no problems with FPR9b3 typing this.

[classilla]

FPR9b3 is out and seems to work fine. Was able to update the wiki and handle issues without difficulty, so marking closed. If you see errors in the Browser Console, open new tickets for them; hopefully it's just a matter of adding needed DOM support.

[ccorn]

Reporting this here, because I suspect it is related:

Upgrading to FPR9 has broken Github Login for me until I specified the UA (as 52ESR Intel).

The phenomenon is that (with TenFourFox default UA, presumably this means no UA at all for github.com) Github delivers a "500" error page after the login attempt, without actually logging me in.

Since that is a server error, TFF should not need to care. However, it seems that Github tries to do something fragile with the UA information after login, and since this thread is about tuning the UA specially for Github, I suppose that you might be interested.

FPR8 lets me login, but has the issues with some Github buttons and Github menus mentioned in this thread unless the UA is changed.

If it helps, I use private browsing mode, uBlock Origin and NoScript with github.com whitelisted.
3rd-party cookies are rejected, other cookies are deleted when closing TFF. The same configuration works with FPR8.

Interestingly, FPR9 lets me login to Github with a changed UA, and Github does not break if I change the UA back to the default (or to, say, Classilla) after having logged in.

[ccorn]

More precisely, Login to Github

• yields "error 500" with a freshly restarted TFF (everything cleared) and default UA,
• works even with UA = Classilla
• still works after signout (without quitting TFF), even with default UA.

I hope this enables you to reproduce the problem.

[classilla]

@kencu or @rmottola , do you get anything like that? It worked fine on FPR9b3 and I didn't change that code for final. I am on a business trip, so I can't test.

However, if it really does cause a 500 error on Github's side to suppress the user-agent header, that's definitely a Github bug. Hopefully someone reads their logs. I would prefer to send no user agent at all than a dummy one because then we have to keep updating the dummy.

[ccorn]

I agree that Github's susceptibility to User-agent header contents, both for login and UI button/menu functionality, ought to be fixed entirely on Github's side. Ideally, TFF should have no special Github codepaths at all, at least none that need to speculate about erroneous Github behavior.
If this bug gets confirmed, I have no satisfying proposal to offer. The best way forward seems to nudge Github about their error 500, and in the wake of that, remind them that user-agent headers are generally not helpful for feature detection purposes and perhaps cause more bug tickets than ignoring the user-agent header would.