CoCalc usability and Firefox

[Eric Gourgoulhon]

Hi,

Since a few weeks, I am trying to convince colleagues and friends to use CoCalc, but the first thing they see is the red message:

"Firefox versions 59 and 60 have a MAJOR bug. You *must* use a different web browser."

This is not very encouraging...

Any hope to have Firefox back soon in CoCalc?

As far as I am concerned, I did not experience any trouble with Firefox except for CoCalc, for which I had to switch to Chrome. I understand that CoCalc is much more sophisticated than a basic web site and that it may not be easy to fix this... But I am quite disapointed to see people moving away from CoCalc because of this...

Best wishes,

Eric.

[William Stein]

Please see the discussion at

https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/issues/2875

and the linked to ticket on the firefox bug tracker:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1453204

We believe the Firefox devs made a major mistake implementing "TLS
1.3" support, and they are not taking
it seriously. This is a fundamental huge bug, which would impact a
lot of sites that use Cloudflare.

The firefox issue does say that you can disable TLS 1.3 in firefox
(and explains how), and that will work around the problem.
Can you try? If so, I can update that message.

-- William

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William (http://wstein.org)

[Eric Gourgoulhon]

Thanks for your prompt reply.

I disabled TLS 1.3 along the lines suggested ("about:config": security.tls.version.max: 3 (instead of 4)) and I confirm the connection to CoCalc is stable again!

(I am using Firefox 60.0.1 under Ubuntu 16.04).

However, users might be reluctant to downgrade the default security protocol of their browser...

Best wishes,

Eric.

[Eric Gourgoulhon]

Just to confirm that the issue is fixed with Firefox 62.0 (running on Ubuntu 18.04).

Everything works well. Thanks!

Best wishes,

    Eric.