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Purebrowser can't open youtube
Closed, WontfixPublic

Description

Hello,

Yesterday I updated my system via APT and have a purebrowser upgrade. Since then, the browser can no longer correctly access the site www.youtube.com, loading only a "blank" page with non-clickable elements.

The last occurrence in "/var/log/apt/history.log" (obtained with the "less" command) is as follows:

Start-Date: 2019-09-21  10:50:03
Commandline: apt upgrade
Upgrade: purebrowser:amd64 (68.0.2esr-1pureos3, 68.1.0esr+really60.9.0esr-1~deb10u1pureos1)
End-Date: 2019-09-21  10:50:44

I uploaded a screenshot of purebrowser with the site www.youtube.com for illustration.

Disabling the "Privacy Badger" and "uBlock Origin" addons resulted in nothing different.

Event Timeline

marcus created this task.Sep 22 2019, 04:01
marcus updated the task description. (Show Details)Sep 22 2019, 04:50
marcus updated the task description. (Show Details)

Hi @marcus - thank for reporting this issue.

Which addons do you have loaded - You should be able to see a status of that by going to the pseudo-adrress about:addons

Your screenshot looks like perhaps JavaScript is disabled or blocked for that site.

mladen added a subscriber: mladen.Sep 25 2019, 00:01

A user confirmed that after deleting PureBrowser profile folder YouTube is working again.

Thanks for that additional info, @mladen

It would be helpful to know which addons (and which version of each) that user has installed.

Hi @jonas.smedegaard, thanks for you attention!

I have the three default addons that come with Purebrowser:

  • HTTPS Everywhere 2019.6.27
  • Privacy Badger 2019.9.23
  • uBlock Origin 1.22.2

As I thought "HTTPS Everywhere" would not affect this, I just disabled the Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin to test, and nothing has changed.
In addition to the addons, more some thing could be disabling Java Script on the site?

Thanks again. Best regards

Those are all _newer_ releases of the addons than provided by PureOS.

Using additional software sources than PureOS may or may not affect if this issue occurs. It certainly complicates further debugging.

@marcus I suggest that you delete your PureBrowser profile. Or if you have precious data in there, then not delete it but move it aside and try import it into a fresh profile.

Hi @jonas.smedegaard , thanks for the answer!

I only updated my system via apt, I added the linuxlibre.fsfla reposity a long ago to update the kernel but don't use this repo a long too, and the only thing I installed manually (again, a long ago) is the libreoffice suite downloaded from the site https://www.libreoffice.org/.

This is the output of cat /etc/apt/sources.list, if help to understand this in any form:

# 

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux none _Green_ - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20180120-02:05]/ amber main

#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux none _Green_ - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20180120-02:05]/ amber main

deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos/ amber main
deb-src http://repo.pureos.net/pureos/ amber main
#deb https://linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/freesh/ freesh
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos/ amber-security main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos/ amber-updates main

I'm REALLY intrigued now about the addons that I have in my Purebrowser being different in any form that the ones distributed by PureOS - how can this be?

Thanks. Best regards

I don't know what happened concretely in your case. Perhaps the versions you read was simply _available_ versions instead of _installed_ ones?

Generally Mozilla Firefox is designed to handle an ecosystem of its own, and the PureBrowser fork do not deviate strongly and might therefore (similar to Debian) easily "flip" from tracking PureOS-distributed packages to Mozilla-distributed addons.

It is possible to configure Firefox to never track Mozilla-distributed code, but that is not done by default for the PureBrowser fork of Firefox (see T299 and related issues, and see also T595 for opposite needs).

marcus added a comment.EditedSep 27 2019, 17:54

Hi @jonas.smedegaard , thanks one more time for the attention.

For the versions of the addons, I went to "about:addons -> extensions" and clicked in "more" on every extension.
I undestood your explanation for a possible reason for this and will do some more research in this topic.

For now, initiating the purebrowser with the "--ProfileManager" argument and creating a new profile solved the issue. I don't know if I need to do something with the post os something...

Thanks, best regards

jonas.smedegaard closed this task as Wontfix.Sep 28 2019, 00:38
jonas.smedegaard claimed this task.

ah right - using the command-line option --ProfileManager provides for a more user-friendly interaction than directly renaming the profile dir. Thanks for mentioning that, @marcus, I'll keep than in mind for future guidance.

As for this issue, it seems too complex to solve so I will close it as a wontfix, leaving our users with the workaround of switching to a new user profile (and afterwards maybe try import data from the old profile).