28.9.0 and YouTube

[LAR Grizzly]

Apparently at least one other Win 7 user experienced the same thing I did.

All of my special "general.useragent" strings have the previously reported "%OS_SLICE%" anomaly.

[eskaton]

I'm on Windows 10 64 bit running PM 28.9 64 bit and all but three of my 'general.useragent.override' entries contain the OS_SLICE text. Two of those are ones I edited manually and the other is web.whatsapp.com.

[Moonchild]

%OS_SLICE% is not an anomaly. It was put there on purpose instead of a build-time hard-coded OS version, but there's something wrong with the code that replaces it.
We're looking into it. For the time being there are overrides in place that the browser will get dynamically from our servers (also a new feature as of this version), but it may take time for that to kick in since we don't have that on fast timers.

You should be able to force an update by going to about:config, then first right-clicking and resetting the preference general.useragent.updates.lastupdated
Then -temporarily- setting general.useragent.updates.interval to "60" until the pref you just reset is filled with a value again, and then restoring the default for the interval pref (to not hammer our server with update requests).

Sorry for the inconvenience. We'll have an update for affected operating systems once we figure out the exact nature of the problem and patch for it.

[LAR Grizzly]

%OS_SLICE% is not an anomaly. It was put there on purpose instead of a build-time hard-coded OS version, but there's something wrong with the code that replaces it.
We're looking into it.

OK. I understand. I'll wait for the point release. Thanks Moonchild.

[JoeyG]

Apparently at least one other Win 7 user experienced the same thing I did.

All of my special "general.useragent" strings have the previously reported "%OS_SLICE%" anomaly.

Mine, too.

As I've mentioned, I was able to get rid of it with a modified user string. This, however, is clearly not sustainable. I, too, thank the devs in advance for the fix.

[Night Wing]

I'll be like everyone else and just wait for the point release update for both linux and windows Pale Moon. If I have to spend a lot of time on YouTube (two or more hours at a time), since my eyes like YouTube's dark version for their new interface, I'll just use linux and windows Firefox, for the time being, depending on what operating system I'm using for YouTube at that time.

When the Pale Moon point release is made, then I'll switch back to linux and windows Pale Moon for YouTube.

[LAR Grizzly]

The point release, PM 28.9.0.1, has fixed my issues with YouTube. Thanks Moonchild!

[groundhog2]

Still happening for me where the old layout is used, not the new. Windows 10, using 64 bit. SHould there be a specific UA override for YouTube? I removed what I had there and still the same.

[Moonchild]

It shouldn't still happening with 28.9.0.1 because that literally has the relevant changes reverted to what it was before...
Are you sure it's not something else interfering here that causes issues? can you use the web developer tools to check the request sent to YouTube and see which useragent string is being sent?
(go to network, clear the display, then navigate to www.youtube.com, and check a request to the domain, under "request headers")

[spline]

Ok, I had this issue too when upgrading from 28.9.0 to 28.9.0.1. Suddenly youtube went back to the old layout.

Went through my settings... I'd been using an override agent for youtube for ages. Suddenly it seemed to have no effect. So I started the whole troubleshooting deal.

After an hour or so of disabling all extensions (no effect), testing safe mode (no effect), resetting all preferences (that worked), then narrowing things down, it came to one setting:

layers.acceleration.disabled = true

Keep in mind I've been using Palemoon a *very* long time, so this setting seems to have been deprecated at some point and in fact no longer exists. But, resetting it (or just removing it in prefs.js) allowed youtube.com to load with the new layout and no extra UA override required. Interestingly there is a layers.accelerated.enabled=true setting nowdays which obviously directly conflicts with the old one.

So yeah... no idea whatever you changed in the point release would cause this ancient setting to affect anything, but after narrowing it down with a copy of my profile on portable, I made that change -and only that change- to my main profile, and now it works.

[Moonchild]

The layers.acceleration pref is causing issues, but -should- have been removed during upgrade, and there shouldn't be any further use of it either (the pref was one of the things changed in 28.9.0's development).
Since there doesn't seem to be any further use of the pref, there's no indication why it would influence anything, so it's a bit of a conundrum. I also can't reproduce any problems when manually setting the old pref in my configuration.
See Issue #1495 (UXP)

If anyone has this issue could you please check the browser's error console?

[spline]

Yeah I can't recreate the problem by going the other way either, starting with a blank profile and then putting in that pref. It's possible that one of the later changed prefs could be affecting it in combination, I was going through deleting/resetting things in order and stopped when I got a successful page display hehe..

I can send you my prefs.js file if you want to play around.

[Tomaso]

Part of this issue probably lays with YouTube itself, and its somewhat inconsistent UA detection.
I'm still using the old UA override, which gives me the classic YT interface (will use it for as long as it works), and block the yellow warning banner with the following adblock rule:

Code: Select all

youtube.com###old-browser-alert

However, every once in a while, I get the new interface regardlessly, and lately this seems to happen way more frequently!
Simply restarting Pale Moon (and thereby deleting all cookies, cache, etc., which I've configured it to do), fixes the problem at my end.

--

Off-topic:
On a side note, Google recently introduced some changes to YT's ad system.
Both EasyList and AdBlock are still fine-tuning their rules to work around some minor quirks, related to adblocking:
https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/5112
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardF ... sues/51070

[JustOff]

Yeah I can't recreate the problem by going the other way either

Looks like I found the reason: one small typo and a bunch of problems

[JoeyG]

I can now verify that with the following settings and "Use hardware acceleration when available" checked, when I use the "normal" UA, I get the new YouTube layout and NO yellow banner.
This holds for both 28.9.0.1 and 29.0.0a2.

[groundhog2]

Okay, not sure if this is what did it but I reset layers.acceleration.disabled = true and added the override UA

Code: Select all

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0 

then removed all YouTube cookies and restarted Pale Moon and it finally switched to the new layout! Back to the dark theme for me, much better on the eyes!

However, my YouTube override string is no longer in bold, what does that mean? As long as it works, I don't care, but it used to be bold.

[Moonchild]

For those interested, here's the technical explanation of what JustOff and myself found out in parallel caused by a typo. Yes, one small typo in the browser's glue code (that binds everything together) can cause a lot of trouble...

So, the problem was a typo in migration code (that should have been caught during development but wasn't, because we normally don't run in a situation where we disable layers acceleration).
This migration code lives in nsBrowserGlue.js which is the javascript code at the heart of Pale Moon's browser initialization that ties everything together.
It is controlled by a pref keeping track of the "user interface version" -- browser.migration.version
If this is current, then the migration code will be skipped. If it isn't current, then the migration code runs and will end with some clean-up of old code that needs to be regenerated, and updating the migration version number to skip it next run.

The typo, when a user pref would be present for layers.acceleration.disabled (and only then), would cause the entire initialization to abort, and making the browser glue initialization end up in an incomplete state causing all these strange errors people have been reporting, including YouTube, Yahoo, etc.
This aborting also resulted in not updating the version number for migration, resulting in the migration triggering every time, hitting the typo every time, and aborting every time, keeping the browser in this half-initialized state. By deleting the user pref, the typo would be skipped over, allowing the migration to complete and with subsequent runs avoiding the error because the migration version would be current. This explains why re-adding the pref didn't do anything since the migration code would no longer run on an updated browser that didn't need migration.

The most influenced websites are the ones requiring user-agent overrides because in its half-initialized state, site-specific user-agent overrides don't work at all and the site will be sent our default user-agent string (which obviously doesn't work very well for those sites needing overrides...) and apparently YouTube does check for Pale Moon, but only insofar as to call us old and unsupported (which is actually worse than not checking for us at all)

[Night Wing]

I'm going to add my two cents in here.

I just created a clean new profile in all of my linux Mint and Windows 7 hard drives for Pale Moon 28.9.0.1 and YouTube with it's new interface (and dark theme) is working again for me.

Of course, I had to put back all of my bookmarks back along with some customizations I had for both linux and windows Pale Moon, but I don't mind. With this COVID-19 virus keeping me sequestered in my home, it gives me something to do to break the monotony.

A clean profile is good every now and then.

[groundhog2]

A clean profile is good every now and then.

That may be true, but it's not an option for me. I have been using Pale Moon for so long, all of my history is in my profile and I'm afraid to ever change or wipe that.

[JustOff]

Btw, now that the main reason has been found, I have to say that my error with SSUAO on Linux was not really the cause of the problems with YouTube. As it turned out, it works just fine without the presence of X11 in the user agent string. This does not reduce my guilt for this flaw, though. I will try my best to have the revised version of SSUAO optimization re-introduced in the next Pale Moon release.