Iris locking up on Google results loading

I’ve been using Iris since last year on RiscOS on my RPi4 2GB. I have RiscOS 5.30 installed, and Iris 1.029, over the last few days when ever I do a google search, the browser loads up the results page like normal until the last 20% (based on the loading bar across the top) then the system hangs.

I have to Alt+Break to terminate WebKitProcess in order to be able to do anything on the system.

Has anyone experienced this issue, or have any idea on how to resolve or get a debug log out of Iris to see what is happening.

Well, stone me. The same happens here. It must (partly) be Google, because the same search on DuckDuckGo behaves normally. Ecosia keeps checking whether I’m human, but at least it doesn’t lock up the computer. By the way, Alt-Breaking WebKitProcess may bring the computer back to life, but the Google page remains inaccessible.

Actually, I’ve a small list (or actually a pretty large one) with other complaints about Iris. I wished there was a user group.

I have also been seeing this in last few days, exactly the same. I managed to get it working again today after I bit by bit rebuilt the Choices.www.iris folder (took a backup first). I had also been using cacheFS as well and now disabled that.

Seems to now be working again.

[…] I bit by bit rebuilt the Choices.www.iris folder […]

Not quite sure what you mean by this. However, just disabling CacheFS doesn’t help, so I’d like to know how to rebuild that folder.

OWB doesn’t have issues with Google, but OWB spoofs as a old Internet Explorer to get google to be useful.

I don’t know if you can spoof with Iris, but if you can it will increase google speed with 200%.

I tried a Google search with Iris now , and it freezes. I haven’t used Iris much , so doubt that it is a cache issue. I also tried to change user-agent. No effect.

Not quite sure what you mean by this.

I’m assuming it’s removing stuff like the database files that Iris generates when using webstorage and the cache.

I don’t know if you can spoof with Iris

You can alter the useragent with Iris so I may try this, see if it makes a difference.

You can alter the useragent with Iris so I may try this, see if it makes a difference.

Yes I tried that, but google didn’t change to old mode.

Something has changed in Google, and seems to only affect if you use the Iris default home page to do the search field for Google there. If I go to the google.co.uk website direct, it seems to not lockup. I will do some more testing soon to see if I can track down what is going on.

Does anybody have access to other WebKit browsers? Is this a RISC OS thing or something in WebKit…?

I’ve tried it on Safari on MacOS 15.0.1 and it works fine, but I wonder if its a legacy issue as I know the webkitgtk version Iris is running on is a few years old now.

If I go to the google.co.uk website direct, it seems to not lockup.

I just fired up my RPi4B and trying google.co.uk still results in a lockup for me when loading results.

I’ve managed to get Iris working again with google by deleting the contents of:

$.!Boot.Choices.WWW.Iris.local-storage

update: it appears to be a one time trick and as soon as the google file within the location above is reproduced by Iris, it doesnt load again correctly and locks up.

which makes me think there is something occuring with google that Iris can’t cope with.

I’ve tried the MSIE 6 useragent on Iris and google works perfectly on it, you have to double click the useragent in the choices dialog before selecting set, or it doesnt change the useragent.

It presents a lite version of the search engine.

From the Inspector view in Iris I can see that the lite version doesnt call the Beacon API as much as the full blown website, and also doesnt call as many security functions in the HTTP header.

So I wonder if there is something that the Iris default useragent should support so google is trying to use it, but then Iris doesnt respond as expected, and locks up

I concur with Andrew on this, It works once and then the next time fails. It still works in NetSurf OK.

I think Andrew is right it might be connected to changes at Google and and the older webkitgtk currently used in Iris.

I believe the person doing the work on Iris for ROD was having to do a lot of work on Iris this year to get it to work with the newer webkitgtk, lets hope the newer version is available soon.

Deleting Iris’s Choices or local-storage does nothing here, the Google search always stiffs.

A comparison of the stiffed Iris search results display with a completed result on Safari shows that the “Quick Settings” cog is missing in Iris. That is to the left of the “Sign in” and “Google apps” buttons at the top right. Inspecting the element with Safari shows a rather weird looking <path> tag, not that I know what that should look like. It looks like a long list of numbers to draw the icon as a path.

Changing the user agent to MSIE 6.00 does indeed evade the issue, the buttons referred to above are not part of the scheme of things in this case.

Changing the user agent to MSIE 6.00 does indeed evade the issue, the buttons referred to above are not part of the scheme of things in this case.

If you set your user agent to e.g. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Firefox/96.0; RISC OS 5.31) you get the google search fallback experience instead of the full fat version, which no longer locks !Iris. Using the MSIE 6.00 one gets the very basic google search.

… Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Firefox/96.0; RISC OS 5.31) you get the google fallback experience…

I’ve set this but put 5.30 as running latest stable not dev release, and yes it does work as expected with a slightly reduced experience as you say.