Observations page breaks Firefox

Bug Reports
1

I am using the iNaturalist website perfectly well, but every time I try to go to the Observations tab Firefix freezes and my Mac tells me I am out of system memory (which has never happened before, no matter how many applications I have open).
Four times I have had to force quite Firefox, and twice reboot, to get Firefox to work again. It appears to work fine on Safari.

2

I don’t have this problem on a Mac running macOS Mojave 10.14.5 and Firefox 68.0. I tried the Observations tab on my page, and also on georgel1’s page.

@goergel1, I see you only have a couple of observations, from July 10. Did you add these before or after you had the Firefox problems? (I’m wondering whether the problem only occurs when there are 0 observations.)

3

@georgel1 I’m not seeing this either, but both of my computers have a lot of RAM.

It would be good to know:

  • the exact URL you are going to (eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations)

  • The amount of memory your computer has, which you can find by clicking on About this Mac in the apple menu of your computer.

  • Finally, it would be great if you opened the console in Firefox (Tools > Web developer > Web console), went to the page that’s causing the crash, and then snapped a screenshot that shows the console, if that’s possible. Then send the screenshot either here or to help@inaturalist.org. Here are instructions for how to take a screenshot on several types of devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org

4

@georgel1 are you still running into this issue? If so, can you provide the info Tony listed above? Thanks!

6

(and @tiwane)

It did not happen again when I had a quick look a few mins ago. To answer the questions, anyway…

  1. I was clicking on the Observations tab shown in this picture below (i.e. NOT the 'Your Observations" link at the top of the page - which goes to a different page)

54

and clicking that tab takes me to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/georgel1

  1. FYI I am using FF v52.7.2 (64 bit) - and it’s the ESR version (yes - deliberately back-level and will not be updated. Mostly using Brave now, anyway)

  2. FYI when it happened I think I may have been on OS X 10.11.3 but am now on 10.11.6 (again, deliberately back-level and not going to be updated)

  3. I have 8gb of memory

  4. Contrary to sullivanribbit’s suggestion, it did not happen when I had zero observations (or I would not have been bothering to go look at them on while exploring the website rather than the app!) ;-)

So something has changed - on my end or yours; more likely mine - and I cannot this evening reproduce the crash, so probably the info I’ve provided is now irrelevant, and it is now a non-issue.

Thanks for reaching out - I’d forgotten all about it. And I had not noticed you are using Discourse - so I am slightly surprised I received no notification of the follow-ups to my original post back in July (had I done so, I’d have answerd there and then). Odd that I received Cassi’s post as an email tonight but not the previous ones. (And it is to too far back for me to check spam folder…)

Hey-ho. Keep up the good work.

1 Like
7

Thanks George! Feel free of course to open up a new bug report if you come across this issue, or any other one, again. Enjoy the match. :)

1 Like
8

The fix to this in Firefox is to click on the “shield” looking icon left of the green lock indicating the HTTPS site and check the cookies there. If you are blocking third-party cookies here, it breaks some pages.