Browsers hang on moodle site

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, May 7, 2017 at 6:42 PM, Esteban Knöbl <estebanknobl at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I work with Moodle sites, and in one of them my browsers (Firefox, Chrome,
> Opera) stop working whenever I activate edit mode on Moodle. They just stay
> loading the page when I try to edit anything on the site, for a couple of
> minutes, after which they return to the home page.
>
> Now, this happens while running Ubuntu (I tested on Ubuntu, Lubuntu,
> Ubuntu Gnome, Linux Mint) but not on Windows, nor Fedora! Additionally,
> this does not happen on browsers based on Webkit, at least not on Epiphany
> or Midori.
>
> This particular site is on Moodle 2.9.5+ (Build: 20160317). The browsers
> are up to date.
>
> So far I could only determine that this is a javascript related issue.
> Deactivating javascript for the site allows me to work on it. However, I
> would like another solution.
>
> Any clues?
>

I saw your question and although I know very little about this, it made me
think a bit about what might be different in your browsers.

I have consistently had trouble with a particular banking site because its
user agent string checker seems unable to recognize the string Firefox for
Ubuntu puts out. It could be that Moodle's javascript is choking on yours.
Have you tried "spoofing" user agent strings from a different operating
system? If it turns out this is the problem, you might submit it as a bug
to Moodle and get it corrected.

Another thing to check is to look at the extensions you have installed. You
may have some you prefer that you've installed and forgotten about. It's
easy enough to turn them off temporarily for testing. Obviously that's more
far-fetched than the above, but it's easy enough to test. If it turns out
an extension is causing the problem, obviously you might first look for a
more up-to-date version of the extension, or submit a bug to the developer.

One more thing to look at, and I only think of this because I've
occasionally had trouble with it -- do you have the "Microsoft Core Fonts"
installed on your linux systems? I feel the package has serious problems
since about the time of Ubuntu 14.04 and occasionally causes weird display
issues. This is a bit more complicated to test, and a much more far-fetched
suggestion, but it seems possible Moodle might pick one of the "core fonts"
in its editor, with a fallback to more generic ones. If you uninstall it
for testing be sure to reboot and open some documents to check for display
issues. Then if you need to reinstall it, note that the package may be
broken on your distro and you may have to go to extra effort to reinstall
it.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/463754/how-to-make-ttf-mscorefonts-installer-package-download-fonts-after-it-says-it-i
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