[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Unable to login to HN from Firefox, a Lovec...
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Tell HN: Unable to login to HN from Firefox, a Lovecraftian tale
Author : soapdog
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-02-01 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andregarzia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andregarzia.com)
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| OT but what theme is that?
| soapdog wrote:
| It is called Graffiti - Balanced.
| csnover wrote:
| When Mozilla started making big changes to tracking protection,
| somewhere around versions 86-90, I started noticing all sorts of
| broken credential management stuff, and I wonder if this is just
| another manifestation of that.
|
| With strict ETP turned on, extensions like Cookie AutoDelete
| stopped working due to some new access restriction[0], and
| cookies that had been set while strict ETP was turned on--even
| when it was turned off again--became zombies that could only be
| deleted through about:preferences.
|
| I've had to manually set `privacy.purge_trackers.enabled` to
| `false` to get it to stop automatically erasing (first-party!)
| login cookies several times per week. I do not understand what
| kind of heuristic is being used to decide something is a tracker,
| but it seems to be not good at it.
|
| For a while, Firefox would also randomly prompt me for a master
| password after running for about 24 hours. This seemed to stop
| when I turned off strict ETP, but other people reporting the same
| problem said they didn't even have strict ETP turned on to begin
| with, so who knows? It's all just so random.
|
| I still have situations today where I navigate (via the address
| bar or the browser history) to HN, or GitHub, or some other site
| where I have a valid login cookie, and Firefox just decides that
| it's not going to send the cookie this time. If I reload the
| page, it decides now it will send the cookie. If I perform the
| exact same navigation that broke a moment ago, now it works fine.
|
| I have no idea what changed, and everything that happens--just
| like the OP's problem--is so weird and vague that I cannot even
| submit a decent bug report. At least this bug is consistent; most
| of my problems seem to be data races. I hope they are able to
| figure out what is going wrong and, ideally, that it leads to
| some fixes for whatever broken logic is causing so much trouble
| with credential management in general.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-
| AutoDelete/issue...
| nneonneo wrote:
| Debugging stuff like this is a real nightmare sometimes, but hey,
| maybe you'll learn something cool in the process!
|
| One thing I'd try would be to make a new profile - you can launch
| Firefox with the -P option to bring up the profile manager. I
| know it doesn't work with either of your existing Stable or
| Nightly profiles, but maybe a clean profile will do the trick?
| jicea wrote:
| Could you attach a proxy (mitmproxy [1] for instance) and check
| the differences between HN requests with/without Private Mode ?
|
| [1] https://mitmproxy.org/
| zelos wrote:
| > Like Ged in Earthsea, this is my own personal devil. I need to
| get rid of it
|
| The book ends with Ged accepting that the devil/shadow is part of
| him, I'm hoping this story has a happier ending!
| soapdog wrote:
| Yes, but it was the only story I remembered on the spot that
| had a very personal devil that challenged only the main
| character :-)
|
| I too am hoping this has a happier ending. All wisdom here
| points towards making a new profile, which is something I'm
| avoiding, but if there is no other choice I might try it later.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It's not like HN is a JavaScript-heavy application with lots of
| polyfills either! If you can't log in to HN, how do you log in
| anywhere?
| soapdog wrote:
| I can login to other sites without any hiccup. Also, I can log
| in to HN from other browsers. I have no idea what is going on.
| :-(
| runnerup wrote:
| Can you try Lynx/Brave/Waterfox as well? I'd personally be
| curious to diff the HN cookie stored in each browser and see
| if there's a difference unique to FF.
|
| I'd also be curious to diff the HTTP requests sent from each
| browser, particularly FF vs FF forks.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Posting from a newly installed Firefox 96.0.3 on macOS 11.6.
| (I've never had Firefox on this OS image before.)
|
| So I'd guess this is a user-specific issue?
| jefftk wrote:
| Are you running any extensions?
| richbell wrote:
| This sounds exactly like the issue I've been having with my
| company's instance of Nexus Repository 3 for the past several
| months. It's a SPA, so I can "log in" and the UI reflects being
| logged in, but all of the API calls to the backend return a 403.
| However, this doesn't happen if I use private mode.
| j_koreth wrote:
| Have you tried looking at the browser privacy settings and
| adjusting them? Not sure if you're on strict or standard.
| soapdog wrote:
| I'm on standard. That was one of the first things I checked
| even though I didn't write that step on the post.
| soapdog wrote:
| OP here: I created a new profile in "about:profiles". I can login
| into HN from that profile. The bug is in the profile then, I just
| need to figure if it is fixable without nuking the profile.
| andrecarini wrote:
| Have you tried diff'ing both profiles' about:config?
| __ryan__ wrote:
| You mentioned clearing cookies from ycombinator.com. Did you
| also clear cookies from news.ycombinator.com?
| soapdog wrote:
| yes, I did.
| lostmsu wrote:
| If you are on Windows and your Firefox profile got borked, try
| ShadowExporer to restore the profile version that still worked.
| Also check if File History is on and has a copy of your profile
| (those two are separate features). Then check if you have image
| backup enabled.
| jedberg wrote:
| I see you tried private browsing and it works, so that would
| imply a bug in something that runs when not private browsing, so
| most likely a plugin that is blocking something.
|
| Start doing a plugin bisection and see if you can find the
| offending plugin.
| soapdog wrote:
| Been through that already. All add-ons disabled and the problem
| persisted.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Well, the idea still stands. Private->ok, not private->not
| ok. That's your telltale sign, go with the evidence, as a
| famous TV show says. Maybe you have something on your normal
| profile, I dunno what, but I like bashing Apple and since you
| say you're on MacOS, see what Apple does with that profile.
| Who knows, maybe you encounter a bug and you can get money
| out of it from Apple's bug hunting program. Good luck!
| nabakin wrote:
| Have you tried uninstalling Firefox, deleting any residual
| appdata, and installing again? Have you tried installing the
| same version of FF Nightly and FF on another macOS computer?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Much less radical is just to use the command line options
| to create a new profile and see what happens. I have fixed
| obscure problems in firefox by blowing away the profile.
| 99% of what I need is stored in firefox sync so it's an
| easy process to delete an old profile and sync back up.
| Sounds like OP wants to get to the bottom of this though as
| a haX0r-ng project.
| soapdog wrote:
| Not yet. I'm trying to figure out what is going on before
| destroying everything.
|
| I did try two different versions of Firefox on the same
| machine though (with different profiles).
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Did you reuse existing profiles on both versions, or in
| either case did you start a completely fresh profile? If
| you haven't yet tested with a _newly-created_ profile
| (which doesn 't require deleting your existing profile),
| then you need to do so in order to triage whether the
| problem is with Firefox-by-default or Firefox-and-your-
| profile.
| nabakin wrote:
| I'd try installing your version of FF Nightly on another
| macOS computer to rule out that possibility. Maybe it's
| not a config issue but something to do with Nightly which
| is affecting your other, release FF
| nabakin wrote:
| Since it exists in both versions of FF, could you have
| anything installed which could be interfering with FF's
| communication with the rest of the internet? Are you on a
| network with a router which is able to modify your
| traffic (requires custom SSL certificate) (long shot)?
| kzrdude wrote:
| You can try a new profile? about:profiles
| [deleted]
| nabakin wrote:
| Maybe an addon made some FF config change which remains
| despite being disabled? Have you tried uninstalling all the
| add-ons as well?
| charcircuit wrote:
| An annoying "feature" of firefox is that if you (even
| temporarily) run low on storage it will go into a mode where
| localstorage (and indexdb?) stop working. This makes a lot of
| sites break for seemingly no reason. You have to restart Firefox
| to fix it.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Fortunately, HN is not such an abomination that relies on all
| these "features" when static html, a tiny bit of CSS, and a
| light sprinkle of JS to gracefully enhance the experience would
| suffice.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I experience the same issue, seemingly randomly, on firefox on
| Android. I log in, it redirects me to the home page, but I am not
| logged in. I retry over and over with the same result. The form
| is filled by my password manager, so I know it is right (I have
| manually typed in credentials as well, same result).
|
| I just switch to chrome when it happens, and it seems to resolve
| itself at random. Last time it happened was a few months ago.
| nabakin wrote:
| Just switched to FF Nightly on Android and logged into HN.
| Haven't reproduced the bug so far.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| A helpful way to debug this is the "copy as Curl" feature in most
| browsers. That should give you the most true representation of
| what request is being sent to HN. Do it in private mode and non-
| private mode and then compare the differences.
|
| The screenshot is probably out of date but here's how to use it
| https://everything.curl.dev/usingcurl/copyas#from-firefox
|
| If you do this in chrome you'll get a long curl command that ends
| like this: --data-raw
| 'goto=item%3Fid%3D30166448&acct=ghiculescu&pw=(YOUR PW)' \
| --compressed
|
| I found it most helpful to change that to --data-
| raw 'goto=item%3Fid%3D30166448&acct=ghiculescu&pw=(YOUR PW)' -v
|
| So you can also see the response headers etc.
| ww520 wrote:
| I've tried logging off and on HN, and logon is fine (Linux,
| version 91).
|
| May be you can try:
|
| 1. Check the clock on your machine. Make sure it's not running at
| a time beyond 2038.
|
| 2. Check the disk space on your machine, especially where the
| profile is stored. Out of space error can be causing other
| errors.
|
| 3. Check the file system read/write permission on the profile
| folder.
|
| 4. Make sure there's not another instance of Firefox running. In
| fact, reboot just to be sure.
|
| 5. Try older versions of Firefox, with the portable versions.
| There's a command line argument to use an existing profile or a
| new one. Try those. This would narrow the problem down to whether
| it's caused by your machine or versions of Firefox.
| https://mozilla-firefox-portable.en.uptodown.com/windows/ver...
|
| Good luck.
| hateful wrote:
| The one thing I noticed is that the updates you posted are at
| least 3 hours in the future from me (EST). Where are you located?
| Maybe it has something to do with you being in a certain
| timezone?
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Maybe try running Wireshark and check that the request from FF to
| HN is sending the cookie?
|
| If the server is fine, the only cause I can imagine is that the
| request after login does not report the cookie as set. Wireshark
| should help confirm whether the request is ok.
|
| Then run strace on Firefox and check that the request written out
| by FF is ok. If that's fine too, then Mac OS must be fudging the
| request somewhere between when FF writes to the socket and when
| it actually leaves your machine?
| soapdog wrote:
| No need for a proxy to check it. HN is very old-school, it is
| very easy to see the raw requests and stuff. Everything looks
| as it should be, it just doesn't work.
|
| I'm inclined to believe there is something funky going on with
| both my profiles. The odds of that happening is very low, but I
| don't see other options.
| iqanq wrote:
| benbristow wrote:
| If you've got this dated view about Firefox it might be worth
| giving it another try. It's come on leaps and bounds, pretty
| much equally on par of speed against Chrome/Edge etc.
|
| Sent from my Firefox install
| jandrese wrote:
| Firefox is basically as good as Chrome but it also has a
| default stance of protecting the users instead of giving all
| of your data directly to Google. Certainly it isn't perfect,
| but you feel like a bit less of a product when you use it. To
| make the HN crowd happy they have (re)written a bunch of the
| codebase in Rust.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Only/One thing I hate about Firefox (under Windows) is it
| updates in the background with the helper service but the
| update isn't fully applied until next launch. So you start
| Firefox, wait the requisite time for the entire browser to
| load, then your screen flashes and FF disappears, then it
| relaunches again for real.
|
| The old experience of manually updating it yourself when you
| felt like it was less annoying than this evergreen
| implementation!
| chias wrote:
| If you use multiple profiles (e.g. i have a "personal" and
| a "work" profile), the experience is pretty bad -- if you
| close all windows of one profile, it considers itself as
| "exited" and overwrites the program files. And then your
| other profile windows no longer work: any page navigation
| results in "We're sorry, we just need to do one small
| thing" and a required restart of your browser.
|
| It's still my favorite browser though.
| soapdog wrote:
| You could use Firefox Containers for that.
| mkl wrote:
| > "We're sorry, we just need to do one small thing"
|
| I get that even with a single profile. It's infuriating,
| because it happens when I go to a new site, and that new
| site is often not restored after it restarts - sometimes
| I lose it completely.
| [deleted]
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Tongue out of cheek, I worry less about Firefox's future than I
| would a browser with an equivalent market share but without a
| lot of developers aware of how the sausage is made backing it
| out of opposition to a Google monopoly. It might be a minority
| brower, but by virtue of who it attracts that minority is
| pretty important when it comes to the web.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I was scared to try this, but I logged out and tried logging in
| again just now (using Firefox). It worked OK. I'm on Firefox 96.0
| on Linux, FWIW.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| What happens if you use Tor Browser?
| jonashus wrote:
| Does setting the cookie using the javascript console (on
| ycombinator.com) trigger the same expired message? Could be a
| good angle if it does.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| When a problem is this specific to a single user, I begin to
| suspect actual bit-rot.
|
| Probably worth checksumming the whole Firefox install against
| what it should be (or the poor man's checksum: uninstall it and
| reinstall it). If that fixes it, it might have been a one-time
| thing, or it might be the start of the end of that machine.
|
| Ages ago, I had a machine administered by a company with a very
| robust binary check-summer. All of a sudden, one of the system
| libraries started failing to run... The check-summer would block
| any executable that tried to run with a hash that didn't match
| one on the allow-list. Took it to company IT, and they checked a
| couple things and said "No, this is a legit block... Your
| checksum doesn't match what the binary should be. Have you been
| having any problems with this machine?"
|
| Wasn't until somebody asked that I realized the once-in-a-blue-
| moon kernel panics the machine would give were probably worth
| mentioning to someone. They concluded I probably had a disk
| controller with just enough badness to fail very, very
| occasionally... Usually the failure would manifest as a kernel
| panic, but I must have gotten unlucky and had it fail during a
| write operation without tripping a validation error. Replaced the
| machine; no further problems.
| wooque wrote:
| This is why I use Chrome, never had even the slightest problem
| with it on any site.
| [deleted]
| doix wrote:
| This is the epitome of technological blue balls. I really want to
| know what's going on. Have you tried making a completely new
| profile rather than modifying an existing one? Trying in private
| browsing mode? Making a new user in osx, installing Firefox for
| that user and trying to login?
|
| I expect an update post when you finally get to the bottom of
| this!
| soapdog wrote:
| I tried two different profiles, one for Nightly and another for
| Stable. None worked.
|
| UPDATE: I can log in using private browsing... holy shit, what
| is going on!
| cornedor wrote:
| Do you have any add-ons that are installed on both Firefox
| and Nightly, but that are not enabled in private browsing?
| doix wrote:
| Make an entirely new profile, I bet it will work. I'm
| guessing both the existing profiles have something set that
| is breaking login. No idea what it can be, unless you
| explicitly blocked cookies from the domain. Not something
| that you can do accidentally though.
| alx__ wrote:
| Yeah I've been down this frustrating route before. Somehow
| your profile has gotten corrupt. You'll probably never know
| why.
|
| Has happened to me for Chrome and Firefox. Creating a new
| profile works. Or if you're feeling paranoid, remove any
| trace of it from the system and do a fresh install.
| millzlane wrote:
| I stopped trying to figure it out when it happened. First
| step I take is "refresh firefox"
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-
| reset-a...
|
| If problem persists, new profile.
|
| If problem continues, reinstall FF.
| silon42 wrote:
| We used to call this "dataloss", "corruption".
| commoner wrote:
| Can you log in to HN on a separate Firefox container?
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
|
| Containers do not share cookies, local storage, caches, or
| other persisted data.
| soapdog wrote:
| I tried that, it didn't work. I love containers, and it was
| one of my attempts to solve it. I forgot to include that
| one in the post, I've tried so many things...
| commoner wrote:
| At this point, I'd create a new profile and try again. I
| know that you've already tried both Stable and Nightly,
| but there is a possibility that both of their profiles
| have been corrupted by some external factor. If the issue
| is not at the container level, then it's probably at the
| profile level.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
| create-...
| millzlane wrote:
| Sounds like a corrupt profile in FF. I was coming to look
| for a comment that mentioned this.
| soapdog wrote:
| It does. But damn, two corrupt profiles? One on each
| Firefox? What is the chance of that?!
|
| Anyway, my last attempt will be to create a new profile.
| I was avoiding that because it feels like quitting. It
| feels like destroying everything and replanting the soil
| hoping for a better outcome even though you have no idea
| what happened before.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| It's just a debugging step. Don't delete your existing
| profile. If you confirm that it's fine in a stock
| profile, then you can use various methods to see what's
| different and find the bug (eg. "what non-default
| settings overrides are set in my profile").
| basisword wrote:
| Private browsing mode is always my first test for these weird
| issues. Usually it then boils down to an extension, cookies
| or cache. It sounds like you only cleared ycombinator related
| cookies. Maybe it's worth clearing everything?
| jedberg wrote:
| OP tried two different profiles on two different versions
| of Firefox, so it's unlikely to be cookie or cache related.
| soapdog wrote:
| I also deleted cache and disabled add-ons, still not
| working.
|
| The successful login with private browsing makes me hopeful
| though. Maybe I'll find a solution :-)
| staktrace wrote:
| Try looking at about:support to see if there are any third-
| party modules (antivirus etc. loaded). That has been a cause
| of problems like this in the past. More likely on Windows and
| I saw you're running macOS, but worth a shot.
| commoner wrote:
| It's worth a try, though Firefox has discontinued support
| for NPAPI plugins since version 52 (March 2017)[?]
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins
|
| The only plugins in the Plugins section of about:addons
| should be the OpenH264 plugin and the Widevine plugin (only
| if DRM is enabled). Both can be disabled there.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Try FF 95.x? FF 96 broke a lot of stuff.
| powersnail wrote:
| Have you tried using a different profile?
|
| My FF profile was corrupted once and a lot of sites stopped
| working mysteriously. Clearing cache didn't help either. It
| has to be a new profile.
| mfashby wrote:
| Time to attach a debugger?
| gildas wrote:
| This might be related to a corrupt profile.
| soapdog wrote:
| It looks like it, but it is happening on two separate profiles.
| Both my Nightly profile and my Firefox stable version profile.
| Unless both profiles are corrupt, which would be odd.
| eadmund wrote:
| Maybe they are both corrupt due to the near-2038 cookie? It
| would be weird, but ... bugs can be weird.
| nabakin wrote:
| Then other people on FF and FF Nightly should be having the
| same issue
| ffpip wrote:
| > That problem lasted just some minutes. I'm back logged in in
| Safari.
|
| You were probably rate limited. I've gotten the "We're having
| trouble serving your request" thing many times when I
| accidentally open 20+ HN bookmarks.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| HN limits POST requests to one every 2 seconds or so per IP
| address. I'm often getting this when upvoting/posting and then
| immediately performing an action in a different tab. I suspect
| this is a fairly recent change because I don't remember this
| being a problem a year ago or so.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Same here, when replying to someone in a thread and upvoting
| their comment in close succession.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sometimes just vote and immediate click on 'reply' makes it
| happen, and only one of those is a POST.
| rzzzt wrote:
| What's the upvote action? Wasn't it changed to a POST
| after the "this upvotes itself" entry?
| [deleted]
| Resonance1584 wrote:
| How many bytes is the cookie? Large cookies silently fail to be
| stored. Do the cookie contents change significantly between
| private and non private?
| [deleted]
| _Microft wrote:
| Could it be that setting cookies for the domain was disallowed
| via the permissions dialog?
|
| When I do that, I see behaviour like you are describing it: when
| I e.g. tried upvoting jedberg's comment with cookies disallowed,
| it actually worked. I was redirected to the login page and back
| to the discussion without staying logged in. After undoing the
| permission change, logging in and having a look at the exact
| comment, I saw that the vote actually went through. Posting a new
| comment showed the same behaviour.
|
| You can find that permission on the "page info" dialog (shortcut
| _Ctrl+I_ if that isn 't localized?)?
|
| Edit: the error message on the console would be different though.
| The described procedure leads to the message _" Setting cookie
| ... has been denied because of a permission set by the user"_
| (translated from German, so the actual message will be
| different). It looks like I was only describing the behaviour
| when cookies are unavailable and not the actual reason.
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(page generated 2022-02-01 23:02 UTC)