John McGaw wrote:
> On 1/29/2021 1:07 PM, Cruz, Jaime wrote:
>> On 1/29/21 9:09 AM, Rav wrote:
>>> On 1/29/2021 8:43 AM, Cruz, Jaime wrote:
>>>> Website is
https://www.capitalone.com
>>>>
>>>> Entering my ID and password results in a screen saying "We've hit a
>>>> snag, try again in a bit." This has been happening for two days.
> snip...
>>
>> The problem is DEFINITELY just with the ESR version of Firefox. I
>> called their support line and gave them detailed information. The
>> person who answered said the oldest version of Firefox they support is
>> 81, and the ESR version is based on 78. Why the ESR version would not
>> work, but Pale Moon (which is based on even OLDER code) would work is
>> a mystery to me...
>>
>
> Not so. I had the same problem with the latest beta version also. The
> fix was to clear Capital One data and cookies and try again -- magically
> everything was back to normal.
I've found that to be a good first step for nearly any kind of rendering
problem, even before resorting to spoofing.
Remember that for the modern web (e.g, "Web 2.0") the browser is as much
a tool for running scripts to deliver dynamic content, rather than the
older method of simply displaying static content composed in HTML.
One of the effects of that is that scripting can get confused, where it
renders something from the cache, when it should be fetching new
content. And a status cookie might be indicating a state that's no
longer valid.
By clearing cache and cookies, that's going to force the browser to
download new data, as if the page in question has never before been visited.
Clearing isn't a panacea, and I've found plenty of instances of where
other troubleshooting is necessary, but it's quick to do, but it's an
easy way of getting close to "as new" status.
One other thing that I do is that I maintain a second profile that I
call "bare metal", where the only non-default settings are to clear all
user data (including cache, cookies and history) at the end of a
session. The effect is that if I launch that profile, I pretty much
have the equivalent of a newly-installed browser.
If Firefox isn't behaving the way I think it should, then restarting
with the Bare Metal profile is a quick way of determining whether the
problem is a problem that's generic to Firefox, or if it's something
specific to my profile, whether accumulated data or preference settings.
Virtually always, my experience is that it's the latter.
With that in mind, knowing that my primary profile is extensively
tweaked with things like blocking of tracking cookies, ad blocking, and
script blocking, I've found that if I need to get to a particular site
quickly without an unreasonable amount of effort to tune my tweaking to
get it all to work, I will often simply restart Firefox with the Bare
Metal profile to do whatever I need to do at that one site (often
purchasing), and then close out immediately, where I know that all my
session data is flushed. Yes, there's a measure of tracking that
happens from ad networks, but no persistent data is kept, and sometimes,
it's better to interact with a site the way it's been designed to work,
rather than fighting against the design.
Smith