Firefox 118 - Hackdot

Re:Firefox 118 by lucasyvas on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:24AM (#37659817)

Obligatory "use Firefox" comment:

Not related to the release notes, but I've recently discovered Chrome is unusable for my use case.

I have two M-processor based MacBooks in the house - one runs mullvad (WireGuard), and the other a company OpenVPN.

For some reason, both have major issues with Chromium-based software. I get ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED every couple of minutes and nothing can load. It kills XHR requests as well, so most web software becomes totally unusable. This also applies to Electron-based software like Discord and Bitwarden. Oddly, Slack seems unaffected so far but maybe it hides it / retries better.

I don't know what its problem is, but the issue does not affect WebKit or Gecko or any other software on the machine requiring networking. So I've dumped Chrome everywhere. I've spoken with several others that are affected by this but I have not found any bug reports mentioning this so I gave up.

I've been on Firefox for ages for personal use, but I can't even use Chrome at work anymore. I'm not sure how they expect people to use this browser in Enterprise with such a glaring issue.

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Re:Firefox 118 by harshreality on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:40AM (#37660104)

https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/15v1cz5/err_net...

Using the official wireguard client allegedly works, but I don't know how they handle ip assignment, which is the complicated part for commercial VPNs like that.

Changing locations sometimes helps.

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Re:Firefox 118 by lucasyvas on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @05:42PM (#37666175)

This is a great tip, although I don't think that explains why OpenVPN has the same issue on this laptop I'm typing from right now.

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Re:Firefox 118 by harshreality on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:20PM (#37681482)

I'd speculate that the problem isn't related to the VPN connection, but to how the Mullvad client app handles the interface (especially if keepalives frequently fail and the interface keeps getting downed).

Even the official clean OpenVPN app has its own sense of up and down tunnels, which could cause similar problems. Wireguard, at least in its official linux implementation, is much lighter weight and if necessary reestablishes an active session on demand (whenever there's traffic) without any interface-level tweaks. That's probably invisible to applications, or at least much less visible even if there are low-level syscalls that can inspect the state of a wg tunnel interface.

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Re:Firefox 118 by hapidjus on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:38AM (#37660068)

Been having the same problems, but I'm not using VPN at all.

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Re:Firefox 118 by a_commentator on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @11:24AM (#37660727)

To echo another comment, I've seen this without a VPN. Check out:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/14xqh92/chrome_help...

and this bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147633...

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Re:Firefox 118 by meiraleal on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @11:36AM (#37660921)

Sadly, my case is the opposite. I use Firefox since the beginning so it is close to 20 years. I'm not going to use it as my main browser anymore as I'm working fulltime with PWAs and service workers and Firefox support of it (or lack of) is unjustifiable.

My new apps make use of modern HTML and JS APIs and I can't count on Firefox implementing them.

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Re:Firefox 118 by toyg on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @11:57AM (#37661233)

"Modern HTML and JS APIs" were designed by Chrome for Chrome, so unsurprisingly work better on Chrome.

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Re:Firefox 118 by meiraleal on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @03:49PM (#37664908)

And Firefox solution is to ignore all developers that think this is a great platform compared to Play Store and App Store. Great way to lose market share.

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Re:Firefox 118 by lucasyvas on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @06:31PM (#37666678)

I think you're justified in this case - this isn't about not supporting Chrome or the features it offers, just saying that it has some issues that make it not great as a browser for many end-users. This is one such case that hopefully has a resolution. But, as for any platform, I think it's fair to take advantage of additional things one platform gives you over the other. That's so long as you properly support the others still.

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Re:Firefox 118 by sam_goody on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:49AM (#37671928)

I use lots of modern APIs and CSS (on our own site) with no issues. I can only remember one site in the past month that had an issue in FF, and it was probably because of user agent checking. What API's are you referring to, and where did you come across them?

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Re:Firefox 118 by PandaBear123 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @12:47PM (#37662055)

Do you happen to be using Verizon Fios and have IPv6 enabled? Apparently they had some underlying issues and disabling IPv6 fixed this for me.

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Re:Firefox 118 by lucasyvas on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @05:40PM (#37666154)

No, I'm currently on a monopolistic Canadian provider :)

I would wager IPv6 is likely on for most newer, provider-owned network equipment these days though. Others on different hardware and providers report similar.

Like I said though, I've been unable to identify a root cause, but Chromium does not like what's happening. At first I thought that my IP was being cycled by my VPN at these times and Chrome struggled to deal with it. I have no other leads, nor do I feel like I'm missing out XD

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