User unable to view Discourse forums on old iPad

Contribute Bug

AI-generated summary

A user is unable to view Discourse forums on an old iPad with iOS 9.3.6. The issue occurs on multiple Discourse forums, including the meta site, and is not specific to the user’s instance of Discourse. JPick has tried Safari and Chrome browsers with the same result.

According to dax, the issue should be fixable since iOS 9.3.5 is supported, but the user’s OS is technically not supported. A possible solution is in the works via a GitHub pull request by joffreyjaffeux, which includes a JavaScript polyfill to fix the issue. However, this fix may not be permanent, and the plan is to display a “browser not compatible” message on the page in the future.

1

Hi everyone, this is quite a specific issue but I’m not sure where else to turn.

A user has reported not being able to view our Discourse forum on his iPad (his only device). When he navigates to the URL, he simply sees a blank page (and sometimes the navigation bar). I had assumed this was an issue either with our instance of Discourse or his iPad. It turns out he can’t view any other Discourse forum either, including this site (meta.discourse), which I assume is the gold standard for configuration. So, I assume this is an issue with his iPad.

(We had a similar issue last week with an elderly user unable to view any Discourse forum on his Windows XP machine - we attributed this to his machine being unable to use TLS 1.1 or 1.2)

In this case, I’m not sure what to suggest he should try in order to fix this issue. Any ideas?

Here are the details:

  • Device: iPad mini
  • OS: iOS 9.36(13G37)
  • Browser: Safari & Chrome (same result on both)

Here’s what he sees when accessing any Discourse forum:

IMG_0894
IMG_08941024×768 20.3 KB

2

From our main site,

image
image738×165 10.1 KB

however your user should be able to use iOS 9.36 per these commits by @j.jaffeux
https://meta.discourse.org/t/ios-9-3-5-and-blank-page/123688/16?u=dax

If your Discourse site is up to date there may have been a regression.

That’s said, since that is an unsupported OS, if there is a trivial fix, we will get it sorted but if anything is looking complicated we will fix it so we properly display a “browser not compatible” message on the page.

7 Likes
4

Hi, when merged an deployed that will fix it:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/9401

I don’t want to break browsers for few lines of javascript so I have polyfilled it, however, as @dax said we are technically not supporting this and this could stop working in the future.

7 Likes