rt.com "comments" section crashes PaleMoon

[Thun99]

Windows 7:
v33.8.1.2 (2025-08-04):
64-bit:
https://www.rt.com/russia/623470-territ ... sia-wants/:

rt.com tweaked their comments about three days ago which then causes PaleMoon to lock up. Any of the rt.com articles which have a "comments" button will demonstrate the problem. Firefox is able to deal with the "comments" button with no issue. Under PaleMoon, hitting the "Comments" button displays a "waiting for rt.com to respond" in the lower left corner, then palemoon locks up.

[Moonchild]

Unable to reproduce but the comments system does not actually load anything, instead shows the following message:

Dear readers! Thank you for your vibrant engagement with our content and for sharing your points of view. Please note that we have switched to a new commenting system. To leave comments, you will need to register. We are working on some adjustments so if you have questions or suggestions feel free to send them to feedback@rttv.ru. Please check our commenting policy

I'm not inclined to register on rt.com, so cannot check further. No hangs observed.
P.S.: a hang is not a crash.

[back2themoon]

I confirm that pressing the Comments button causes an unusually long hang (increased CPU usage). It is not a crash, and it will resolve itself if you wait a bit more. I guess the time needed depends on local CPU power. The main problem is that the actual comments do not appear afterwards.

There was a message in the Console about serviceworkers not being supported. Also, there's this:
CONTAINER_IS_HIDDEN Container with id "adfox_1630334730954958" is hidden 1 context.js:2:292830

Can't say if it's relevant. Tried enabling serviceWorkers and restarting. Nothing changed, except for the change to "Service Worker Registered".

I'm not inclined to register on rt.com, so cannot check further.

You don't need to. As mentioned, register is required for posting comments, not reading them.

rt.com tweaked their comments

I assume you already sent them an email about this...?

[adoxa]

It's something to do with how it resizes. What it seems to want to do is create an iframe with all the comments, get the size of that, and set the containing div to that size (via a variable); it's getting stuck in a MutationObserver loop. Here's a Modify HTTP Response filter to work around it (disconnect the observer and remove the style so it sizes itself as usual).

Code: Select all

[["www.rt.com",["/\\/\\d+-/",["currentRoot.style","observer.disconnect();$&","/\\[data-remarkroot\\]/g","[skip-data-remarkroot]"]]]]

[back2themoon]

Amazing work, adoxa. The comments are displayed AND the hang is gone.

Only problem I see here is keeping track of all the workarounds in order to disable them, when/if they'll be "implemented" natively i.e. when/if websites start working without them.

[Moonchild]

In the case of MutationObservers, it's usually because the webdesigners do something illogical and it only works on mainstream because those browsers have worked around the bad design instead of educating webmasters that they should not code badly.
If there's a mutationobserver hang, it'll be (in pretty much all cases) because the observer is attached to something that the observer itself changes. That's bad coding. There are tons of solutions for this kind of issue but "because it works in {mainstream browser here}, it's not being addressed", usually because the "wrong" code is fewer lines than doing it "right". Although in this case it seems they just copy-pasted a vaguely-licensed module (probably unmaintained) without even knowing there's an issue.

The issue is in their "lazysizes" script:

Code: Select all

13:50:43.250 Error: Script terminated by timeout at:
ue@https://en.russiatoday.com/static/js/libs/lazysizes.min.js:27:3665
 1 lazysizes.min.js:27:3665

I've sent them a feedback e-mail about this and hope they will address it.