Twitch, Ghostery, NoScript, NoAdsPac, No worky

[AnotherSignup]

Twitch has been doing a lot of, well, twitching for me lately. First it worked, but I can only watch live streams, not a previous stream that has ended. Then it's the largely blank page with the small "Twitch" text at the centre and I can get nothing. Then it works again, only this time I can also watch previous streams. Then I am back to the essentially blank screen and nothing doing, which is where it now seems determined to stay. This started with PM 25.8.1 and continues through to the latest version.

This is a nightmare of complexity for me. I have tried to figure out what of the many, many scripts need to be running (really, what's the bloody point of no script if we are pushed more and more to allowing more and more scripts so they know exactly where I'm pointing my mouse, what my pulse rate is and how many times I scratch my balls a day). Nothing seems to work. I have allowed all scripts (not advisable of course), nothing doing. I have tried allowing everything with Ghostery, turning off my no ads pac file, all just to try to eliminate and work out and, it's just doing my head in. I'm getting too old to deal with all this shit just to watch someone play a game with a nice 6mb/s resolution instead of the squash youtube makes with their poor encodings. Oh, and I can't even begin to get onto the subject of the spew of cookies they want to shove down my throat - to the inexorable point of volcanic vomiting.

Has any kind soul here gone through this hell with these addons and figured out what finally works? Or am I going to be reduced to the intolerable discomfort of having to lower myself to using, ugh, I can barely say it ... IE (excuse me now whilst I go scrub myself clean).

[megaman]

Yeah, I was having the problem one day, myself, yet it worked fine the following day. It was even happening in a Clean Profile, at the time.
It was working fine in IE and EDGE, though, at the time.

I'm watching a stream as it is, so it should work fine. Try with a New Profile.

[AnotherSignup]

Yeah, that's my point, though. It works, of course, with a clean profile. But I'm not going to view with a clean profile that allows every script to run. I need to try to establish what scripts are the problem. It's not cookies, I accept twitch cookies (block all others) and that's ok.

It seems to me that even having noscript and ghostery installed stops the site from working properly because allowing everything, just as a test produces the same problem.

[Pallid Planetoid]

It seems to me that even having noscript and ghostery installed stops the site from working properly because allowing everything, just as a test produces the same problem.

For me NoScript needs to Allow twitch.tv, jtvnw.net, quantserve.com, krxd.net, I don't use Ghostery but do use Disconnect (which I understand does the same thing as Ghostery) and didn't need to do anything with Disconnect and the website appears to work for me.

[AnotherSignup]

Further testing ... doing my head in. Anyway:

Using another instance of PM that has no Ghostery, NoScript and doesn't use any NoAds pac file - Twitch doesn't work.
Check addons - Flash and BetterPrivacy 1.68.1 (because apparently 1.69 is incompatible with PM 26.0.2 and won't even install), so, ah, I think, it's BetterPrivacy, somehow.

Using yet another instance of PM that is clean, apart from Flash of course - Twitch works. Seems to confirm it's BetterPrivacy. To test, I install BetterPrivacy in that instance, with all the same settings as my two other profiles. Twitch STILL works!

Proceed to smash my head against the wall. Think a bit, smash my head some more, think some more ... can only think some difference in prefs.js Have no idea what it could be given that I have now checked all the media.xxxxx strings are identical.

Any suggestions as to what may be the problem with prefs would be appreciated.

EDIT:

For me NoScript needs to allow Allow twitch.tv, jtvnw.net, quantserve.com, krxd.net, I don't use Ghostery but do use Disconnect (which I understand does the same thing as Ghostery) and didn't need to do anything with Disconnect and the website appears to work for me.

Thanks for the pointer with the scripts. However, what I've found above suggests scripting issues are not related, because they're running in the instance where Twitch still won't work. ???

EDIT 2:

Nevertheless, already allow jtvnw.net and ttnvw.net but no krxd.net shows. Testing to allow quantserve.com, still doesn't work.

[megaman]

Any suggestions as to what may be the problem with prefs would be appreciated.

I use BetterPrivacy on both my laptop and desktop. When I test and adblocker, it's Adblock Latitude on the desktop and uBlock on the laptop.
Neither Better Privacy nor the adblockers seem to be a problem, and that's with many filters. (Then again, BetterPrivacy settings might differ from you and me.)

Now, it could be a filter on your ad blocker, though.
Then again, the problem could be that your Profile is corrupted and you need to start anew. Well, I try to always clean install, or at least make a New Profile, upon every upgrade.

Ghostery is said to be more problematic, at least that's why I never used it again. (It's been like over 2 years that I ditched it, while I used it for about 2 years prior.)4
I don't know about NoScript as that is a pain to use to allow so many sites, too time-consuming.

I never even heard of NoAdsPac, so that's jargon to me.

We will have to go step-by-step, but in the end, I mentioned that it doesn't cause issues with me and I watch Twitch almost daily for hours on end.

[AnotherSignup]

Thanks for your input but all I can say is a big, fat YES! I figured it out. The problem does lie with an entry in prefs.js:

dom.storage.enabled

Default is true. I have it set to false. Resetting to true and Twitch works. So all the other stuff was a great, mind-boggling (for me, anyway) red-herring. Now all I have to do is remember why I disabled dom storage. I think it probably has something to do with my feelings about cookies, scripts and LSOs. So, off on another hunt.

Thanks for your input, gents, still helped me to keep focused on figuring it out.

[dark_moon]

Yeah disable dom.storage.enabled can break some websites.

You disable it because of privacy settings, like me

With Pale Moon Commander addon a easy GUI exist for disable/ enable this:

[Pallid Planetoid]

Thanks for your input but all I can say is a big, fat YES! I figured it out. The problem does lie with an entry in prefs.js:

dom.storage.enabled

Default is true. I have it set to false. Resetting to true and Twitch works. So all the other stuff was a great, mind-boggling (for me, anyway) red-herring. Now all I have to do is remember why I disabled dom storage. I think it probably has something to do with my feelings about cookies, scripts and LSOs. So, off on another hunt.

Thanks for your input, gents, still helped me to keep focused on figuring it out.

You're saying that when toggling the pref dom.storage.enabled to "true" then "Twitch works". Of course the fact that default is "true" would mean that at some point the setting had been toggled "false". (I checked and since it IS "default" I found it set to "true" as expected and why no problem existed for me with Twitch that I could see)

That's the problem with changing a preference from it's default w/out making a notation as to why the change was made. (I'm guilty as well of course) It's so frustrating wondering why a setting was changed from it's default setting in the first place when it's found out the default is what is needed to make a specific website work after all.

[Pallid Planetoid]

Yeah disable dom.storage.enabled can break some websites.

You disable it because of privacy settings, like me

With Pale Moon Commander addon a easy GUI exist for disable/ enable this:

dom storage.png

Since you have the setting disabled (false) I'm assuming you don't use Twitch.

So then the preference setting is "safer" disabled unless one has to enable it to have a website work, that's it? Hmmm, always some trade-off isn't there.

[AnotherSignup]

Yeah disable dom.storage.enabled can break some websites.

You disable it because of privacy settings, like me

With Pale Moon Commander addon a easy GUI exist for disable/ enable this:

Yes, looking into it I'm reminded as to why I delete any instance of webappstore.sqlite in my profiles because that's the DOM Storage. I just wish there was a way that I could have PM delete the file on close instead of resorting to manual, or cCleaner (which I naturally don't use at the end of every PM session). Alas, messing around with cookie settings and permissions still leaves webappstore.sqlite files in my profiles.

Thanks anyway for the suggestion for Pale Moon Commander. I'll look into it because presently (as of yesterday) I am keeping a tab open with about:config and dom.storage.enabled, listed alone for easy, no accidentallly-toggling-the-wrong-setting mishaps.

That's the problem with changing a preference from it's default w/out making a notation as to why the change was made. (I'm guilty as well of course) It's so frustrating wondering why a setting was changed from it's default setting in the first place when it's found out the default is what is needed to make a specific website work after all.

It gets worse when you come to tweaking over a longer period of time, despite multiple files detailing the myriad tweaks you do and why, and multiple back-ups, some things will sometimes be lost along the way ... or, at least, temporarily forgotten. A failing brain doesn't help, either - hence why so much of this nowadays simply does my head in. I could have sailed through it 20 years ago. And yes, I do still have some files from that far back. Just not the ones I needed right now