We have an instance running on stable where some users are experiencing some really odd behavior on their phones that makes it nearly impossible to use our site:
As you can see, the screen just randomly jumps around.
Now, we’ve only had two reports of this, but that’s still a nonzero number of our regular users who can’t use the site on mobile - who knows how many people this has scared off.
This happens on both the app and their actual browser. One of our users with the issue has an iPhone 5S - we’re working on getting details from the other user now.
If anyone has seen this before, we’d really appreciate some help tracking it down. We’ve already ruled out a theme issue by creating a completely default theme, on which the issue persists, but haven’t yet discovered what the actual issue is.
From our other user on an Android phone (Galaxy S9, Android 10, Chrome/Edge/Firefox all break):
So there are a couple things that are issues. There’s a delay between hitting reply and the editor coming up, when it does it often removes my keyboard, so I have to tap on the editor, which brings my keyboard back but freezes the editor for a second or two. If I minimize the editor I can’t pull it back up about half the time or so and have to hard refresh. It’ll often lag behind what I’m typing. If I try to scroll within the editor or make changes it freezes…idk maybe half the time or so, more often if it’s longer than a few words. Minimizing and scrolling the thread means I can’t bring the editor back up. Even just scrolling the thread without the editor is kind of difficult, lots of jumped posts, and (separately) will freeze then jump ahead sometimes.
idk if anybody on the team owns an iPhone 5s but that is thus far the only model of phone that has consistently encountered these issues that we’re aware of
Assuming a fix is found, how long does it take to get pushed to stable? Given that’s what we’re on, and this bug makes the site basically unusable on mobile for a subset of our current users, I’m a bit scared at the idea of having to wait months for it - but we also can’t just swap off of stable, either.
Wait, so a backport to stable made it unusable on these browsers? Or stable was unusable ever since we cut it?
Not setting a deadline on this yet prior to having a good handle on the extent of the problem. As a general rule we don’t want to have broken behavior anywhere, however as browsers move out of our supported list they should fall back to HTML readonly view.
What is the exact version of browser the users are on? (exact iOS version should give us that info)
Stable should work fine on iOS 12 - it was cut before we started using replaceAll in the critical path, so the polyfill should not be required. The issue in the OP doesn’t look like it would be caused by a missing library.
The user doesn’t know for sure when it broke because they barely ever use Discourse on mobile but they have memory of it working at points in the past - when asked “When would you say is the last time you are confident it worked on mobile?” they responded with “Around a year and a half ago” so realistically any changes to stable during that time could have been responsible - or perhaps before, if like ChiefDelphi we randomly happened to be working.
I definitely think that since Meta is known to not work it would be best to focus efforts here, and perhaps the owners of ChiefDelphi could be contacted to see if there are any particular differences that allow their site to work?