app.element.io fails to load on browser startup

[michaelkaye]

Description

Describe here the problem that you are experiencing, or the feature you are requesting.

Unable to load
Element can't load
Something went wrong and element was unable to load

Steps to reproduce

Ensure app.element.io opens by default on launching Firefox (for example, pin the tab, or have it open when closing the browser so it is automatically reloaded on start) - this has happened multiple times, but generally I only see it when firefox has been restarted at the start of a new day. Otherwise loading is perfectly fine

View the page

Describe how what happens differs from what you expected.

I see the screen shot above, not the UI

As an odd side effect, attempting to click on the link does not take me to element.io either.

Logs are hard because this is before any of the JS has loaded, but the console did display:

"09:12:32.596 Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://app.element.io/bundles/504aa24e021ebeda5b73/init.js”. app.element.io:1:1
09:12:32.597 ChunkLoadError: Loading chunk 12 failed. (error: https://app.element.io/bundles/504aa24e021ebeda5b73/init.js)     Webpack (6)
         e
         64
         64
         a        
        <anonymous>         
        <anonymous> 
index.ts:213:12     64 index.ts:213
webpack://src/vector/index.ts

Not sure if it's useful, but when i do refresh the page, it does go and download https://app.element.io/bundles/504aa24e021ebeda5b73/init.js from the webserver, so the bundle version number is right

The network was up by the time i started firefox.

Prepared to believe it's a firefox bug, but reporting anyway.

Version information

• Platform: web (in-browser)

For the web app:

• Browser: Firefox 83.0 (ad blocker installed, but 0 blocked on the page)
• OS:Ubuntu
• URL: app.element.io

[jryans]

@michaelkaye Is this a new issue, or has it been like this for a long time?

At first glance, it seems like it may be hard to fix this, as we rely on the browser to load the various scripts, and can't do much if they fail...

[michaelkaye]

@jryans i've noticed it in the last ... couple of weeks there's maybe been three examples? It's new, but that could also be new-firefox-new

Maybe one suggestion in the short term is a bit of TLC for this page, possibly with the simple suggestion of adding "Try refreshing this page" as the explicit action that will probably fix this sort of thing?

[jryans]

Sure, I'd be happy to accept a PR that clarifies this text to add that refreshing might help.

[lampholder]

I've also seen this a few times recently - quite reliably just now I've achieved it by going to https://develop.element.io/#/room/#testclassroom:matrix.org in a new private firefox window. It goes away after a few refreshes.