I love Reddit, but it has the worst popularity to UX ratio I've ever seen. They try very hard at making their web UI annoying so you switch to their mobile app.
i.reddit.com actually works quite well on mobile, but I think this has even more risk of being shut down at a moment's notice so try not to mention it too much.
That's basically an invalid locale prefix. Since ns is an invalid locale code or has no translations, it uses the default english. Reddit also used np.reddit.com which stood for non-participation. Basically there was subreddit CSS that disabled the voting buttons and comment dialog.
I often wonder about the dumpster fire that is the web version of Reddit. Normally I assume incompetence over malice, but - they had a perfectly decent working link aggregator site over a decade ago, and more than sufficent resources and budget to maintain that site and make small improvements to the UX and design over time. So the only conclusion is that this is a planned, prolonged and deliberate act of self-sabotage and vandalism.
The mobile app is terrible too. Even many of the 3rd party apps are not very good, especially on iOS. There are some good ones for Android like Boost and Relay, which I wish I could get on iOS.
It is an embarrassingly bad mobile app and web UI for one of the most popular sites in the world that really grew up natively on the modern web.
I think they are trying to facebookifying (for the lack of better word) their interface. The trade off here is that user engagement lost due to bulky js is covered by the increase in user engagement due to flashy web features. user engagement is corporate double speak for user addiction.
I can't help but have a sinking feeling that this as a result of the wider trend of using only Chromium-based browsers. If they were the ones affected by this issue, I feel like it would get solved almost immediately.
I was seeing problems in Chrome a couple hours ago. In the fancy editor it was taking seconds to echo, and the cursor would jump to the start of the text, and placeholder text was not being replaced with typed text. The older editor where you have to manually enter markdown worked fine.
I assumed they had done something that botched the JavaScript of the site. Maybe some update went badly today, and it manifests differently in Firefox and Chrome?
Anyway, whatever it was either they didn’t test well in Chrome either, or they don’t use the fancy editor themselves.
It was fixed within an hour or so. I didn't even realize, surfing on reddit and it was working. I was just mindlessly surfing like I normally do and then it clicked, "oh cool, Reddit is back up".
I think GP's point was Reddit breaking Chrome would cause a big uproar and result in the issue being fixed quickly, not that Chrome has more engineers.
I'm at home, and I thought my ISP had decided reddit was unhealthy for me. But when I found I could ping reddit and still access it from the reddit app on my tablet computer I decided it was some mystery reddit error.
It seems to be an http3 issue. Trying to find a way to replicate it in a Chromium browser. I am trying to understand whether it is a Firefox specific issue, or if it's Reddit not handling the fallback.
May not be a Firefox issue. Google uses h3 protocol and it works fine.
Firefox is back online for Firefix. Everything request from reddit appears to be h2 from both FF and Chromium, I wish I checked earlier when it was still blocked.
> I was the incident commander for this one and came by to drop a bit of information about what happened here.
> We were attempting to mitigate some problematic traffic that had been causing a low amount of site errors over the past few hours. In doing so, we identified some traffic characteristics that we believed correlated with the error rate and attempted to block it. It turns out this blocked Firefox traffic, which we noticed relatively quickly, leading us to revert the change.
> Apologies for the disruption!
> (Also kudos to the commentor who had a great RCA, but sadly the comment got deleted before I could respond)
I died when I first saw the message. I do marketing on Reddit for my upcoming SaaSs, but try to stay within the rules. So I thought they were trying to ban me!
For a while now, Firefox blocks requests to reddit.com when visiting other websites. I mean, if domain.com sends a request to reddit.com, it gets blocked through the Enhanced Tracking Protection thingie. I know this because I built a front-end for reddit and I have to turn Enhanced Tracking Protection off for the domain.
Oh, I thought it was just me. What a strange error. I've never seen just the word blocked and nothing else. Even viewing the source shows nothing else. And it works fine in Chrome. So... I assume this is something Firefox did?
There's a lot of useful information contained within Reddit, not just memes, celebrity worship, and porn. I'd like to see decentralized alternatives flourish.
In all seriousness, it feels like it was a long time coming. There were indications that web is moving towards one approved browser. It is just our luck that one browser is Chrome.
Honestly, the number of complex web-applications that are degrading slowly in firefox is only getting longer. At my office: the HR benefits system is completely broken in FF, some of our training modules in the training system fail, Azure DevOps needs me to close the browser completely and re-open to clear some kind of JS or shadow state or something...
It's bad and getting worse and I don't know how much longer I can stick with FF.
On the other hand, I just got on-boarded to a doctor's office system that included a warning (delivered with the on-boarding link by SMS) that the website would "only work on a PC with Firefox or Safari".
I've run into a few older sites designed around IE quirks that have stopped working under MS Edge but run great in FF, actually. Sql Server 2012 Reports websites for example. Which makes sense - FF was designed to imitate some IE idiosyncracies that Chrome didn't care about, and Edge/Edgium uses Chrome renderer now.
you can't help but admire the intellectual elite of hacker news users that don't actually know anything about technology
linking to month old issues, thinking html encoding warnings are somehow related, thinking http3 is an issue when you have just to press f12 to see it's not used
Blocked on firefox but not on Safari. Also other computers in my house on the same IP are not blocked.
I was researching Russian-Ukranian relations abd posting in r/worldnews about the crisis there. Wondering if it's related, or if lots of users are experiencing this as a blanket issue.
How exactly do they determine it's Firefox? I tried it from Postman using the same headers from Firefox and I get a 200, and fidgeting with the headers in Firefox doesn't change anything.
Also replying has been broken for a long time. By default it uses "fancy pants" editor when you are typing reply, and this is totally broken. You have to switch to another mode to reply.
Also replying has been broken for a long time. By default it uses "fancy pants" editor when you are typing reply, and this is totally broken. You have to switch to another mode to reply.
How does a browser experience "outages"? Uh... In my mind it is just a tool and any outage would have to be on the part of the server/website I am trying to browse.
Also from a Reddit Admin:
> We believe we've tracked down the issue that was impacting some of your bots. There may be some lingering 403 issues as we hash it all out over the next day or so
spent a good part of my morning trying to figure out why Reddit was down but nobody on the internet mentioned that. Tried chrome and Reddit is fine, so something weird must be going on with FF
Works on Safari, but is 'blocked' on Firefox... I was researching Ukrain-Russian relations, and posting in r/Worldnews at the time regarding the recent news. Wondering if it's related, or if lots of users are experiencing this.
Looks like FireFox is actually blocking Reddit rather than the other way around.
Edit: Firefox blocked the site from loading as it would have been unsafe to attempt due to the encoding problem. I wasn't implying anything else and even posted the browser's own error message. Relax.
Check your console:
The character encoding of the plain text document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the file needs to be declared in the transfer protocol or file needs to use a byte order mark as an encoding signature.
It's just a warning firefox is logging because the "Blocked" response is just `text/plain` and doesn't have a header specifying the character encoding.
Yes, the browser wasn't sure if its render engine would get stuck, but there was a big chance it would only end up dumping a bunch of garbled text on screen anyway (of a different sort than usual :) ). Therefore it decided to simply not load the file at all.
In other words, Firefox literally blocked the website from loading and that's precisely what I said.
Firefox contacted the server, and the server sent back a 7–byte text/plain response containing “Blocked”. Since no encoding was specified, Firefox guesses and displays “Blocked” on the screen. Hopefully it was in an encoding you could read, but in case it shows up as mojibake or something Firefox also put a warning in the dev console. The warning isn’t for end users, it is for the developer of the site who is wondering why their site shows up as mojibake.
