8 ms·
Ask HN: Why can't I login to HN via Firefox?
I can login via Chrome or IE, just not Firefox. This behaviour started very recently - a matter of a few hours ago.
Also, for future reference, what is the best way to ask about this sort of problem?
- ColinWright 13y agoTry using "Private Browsing" - it sounds like you have the same problem I have, reported here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5649704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5649704 No one seems to be taking it seriously.
- algorias 13y agoI'm having the same issue, and also wondering what the official support channel for HN is.
- ColinWright 13y agoPlease don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com. -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dfc 13y ago...and yet you posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5649704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5649704
- niggler 13y agoAs we have seen time and time again, internal consistency is for the plebeians
- koenigdavidmj 13y agoA foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- youngerdryas 13y agoEverything in moderation, including moderation.
- dfc 13y agoThis is my favorite of Colin's: "Isn't HN amazing? Here is the same article submitted on no less than four previous occasions: * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185226 * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170972 * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355548 * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167834 Total upvotes: 29. Total discussion: 0. No wonder people try to game the system and find optimal times to submit things. No wonder people think HN is broken."*[1] What he failed to mention is that his submission was the fourth and most recent duplicate (oldest to newest): 4167834: zmanji 4170972: VeXocide 4185226: moobirubi 4355548: ColinWright And obviously he had a justification for his duplicated submission.... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4638756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4638756
- niggler 13y agoSomeone clearly cares deeply about HN karma. Not sure why he cares so much.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 13y agoIt's not karma, it's the functioning (and occasional lack thereof) of the "community." Since I run more than one early-stage groups, I'm continuing to learn all I can about what works, what doesn't, what seems broken, and what can be done to make them better. Don't assume you understand my motivations.
- ColinWright 13y agoIndeed - at the time no one else had reported problems, and it was a taster/teaser to see if it was just me, or a system-wide problem. I wasn't asking for support, or reporting a problem to HN, just seeing if it was a local SNAFU.
- niggler 13y ago"at the time no one else had reported problems" How do you know others didn't do the right thing (by emailing info@ycombinator.com) ? AFAICT emails sent to the address aren't publicly available.
- ColinWright 13y agoYou're right, I didn't know that he hadn't already had a flood of hundreds of emails. However, it was about 4 in the morning in California, so I figured even if he had hundreds of emails, I wouldn't find out quickly. More, I figured that most of the other times something goes wrong at least someone posts to HN asking, and no one had done so. I was hoping to find out if the problem was unique to me, and I suspected it wasn't. I was half hoping to head off the usual flood of posts that something was wrong and let there be just the one place, and I was certainly not expecting this reaction. I am bewildered at the hostility, and going away to try to understand it. I feel a bit like I've been kicked.
- niggler 13y ago"I am bewildered at the hostility, and going away to try to understand it. I feel a bit like I've been kicked." IF there's any hostility, it's directed at people and acts that are seen as inconsistent: You point to the rule that says "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something ... If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com. " after you made a post telling them that the site is having issues. "More, I figured that most of the other times something goes wrong at least someone posts to HN asking, and no one had done so." That's not an excuse for you to do something which, as you pointed out, violates a rule. "I was half hoping to head off the usual flood of posts that something was wrong and let there be just the one place," Incidentally there is one place that did head off the usual flood of posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5650171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5650171 Are you complaining that it wasn't your post that was the one place?
- youngerdryas 13y agoPG has repeatedly said that HN, despite its size, is still an experiment, so there is no support channel, I'm sure when he has time he will look into it.
- huhtenberg 13y agoIt didn't help in my case. Nor did the cache and cookie purging.
- phaylon 13y agoThe cookie variant didn't work at first for me either. I had to delete the cookies, refresh the page, and then try to login. Then it worked for me.
- timtadh 13y agoFinally worked for me when I purged the cookies and restarted with no cache.
- sp332 13y agoThis worked for me after clearing cookies alone didn't work, even several times. Thanks!
- DoubleMalt 13y agoFor me too.
- dochtman 13y agoYeah, WTF. I noticed it this morning on my work computer (Firefox Aurora on Windows 7). Logging in here from Chrome to upvote. Logging in seems to work; I don't get an error. But the session doesn't stick, after the redirect I don't get my custom navigation bar color. P.S. Removing news.ycombinator.com cookies didn't help.
- rjbond3rd 13y ago> P.S. Removing news.ycombinator.com cookies didn't help. Same here. FF 20 on Linux.
- dhugiaskmak 13y agoIt didn't work for me at first, so thinking that I had somehow failed to clear the cookies I tried it again and was able to log in.
- pfortuny 13y agoDidn't help here either.
- RobAley 13y agoI deleted the HN cookies, then it allowed me in again.
- azakai 13y agoWorks here too, thanks for the tip!
- powertower 13y agoClearing browser cookies in IE9 does not work for me. After login it just puts me back to home page and I still see the login link on the right.
- ramayac 13y agoWorked like a charm, thanks for the tip!
- kijin 13y agoCleared cookies. Still can't login. FF 20.0.1 on Windows 7.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoDitto, on FF20, except I had to delete them twice.
- DoubleMalt 13y agoI had to refresh the page after cleaning the cookies and before the login, too.
- Millennium 13y agoThis worked for me as well. I haven't had any trouble since (not even when using Firefox on a different machine).
- p4bl0 13y agoEven after deleting all HN related cookies, it still doesn't work in Firefox (Iceweasel 17.0.1). EDIT: it worked after I re-deleted all the cookies and re-force-reloaded the page.
- kevingadd 13y agoNuking my HN cookies fixed it. Using FF Aurora.
- felipebueno 13y agoYep. It worked for me as well. Thanks! =)
- sp332 13y agoThis worked on my home desktop but not my workstation. I get a new set of cookies when I try to log in, but I'm still not logged in. (Tried repeatedly.) Edit: clearing cookies, then refreshing the page before trying to log in again, did work. (Thanks phaylon!)
- youngerdryas 13y agoGlitches in Safari and IE10 as well.
- ISL 13y agoJust had to re-login to HN for the first time in weeks on Chromium. Android required a refresh (something about a user id conflict). Something must have changed on the backend.
- mschuster91 13y agoMe too (Win7 x64 Chrome), but I could login without problems
- lucb1e 13y agoSince upvotes are invisible, I guess I'll have to make a "me too" post. So yep, I also had to login for the first time in as long as I remember on Win7 x64, Chrome 24.
- coloneltcb 13y agoditto on Safari OS X
- protomyth 13y agoadd Safari on OS X to that list. Made me do a bit of a double take since the login was taken until I clicked the comments link at the top of the page.
- cryptoz 13y agoOh that's neat! I usually have to re-login every day on Chromium, HN never remembers my session past a few hours. I think it's got something to do with multiple devices - HN only allows one or two logged in sessions I think, and tablet/phone/laptop/desktop over the course of a day messes that up.
- singold 13y agoI think that the multi-device-thing is not a problem, I've been logged in for weeks (or months) from my laptop (Chrome), work PC (IE 6-8) and 2 different phones (android) without problems
- jgrahamc 13y agoI can't speak officially for anyone at YC, but I happen to know that they have been experimenting with nginx 1.4 with SPDY support and there was an incompatibility with the Arc web server and specifically with cookie handling. An intelligent guess says this has something to do with what you are seeing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- powertower 13y agoDoes not look like it's enabled right now - http://spdycheck.org/#news.ycombinator.com http://spdycheck.org/#news.ycombinator.com
- kogir 13y agoCheck again now ;)
- tokenadult 13y agoI can confirm that there was a technical change on HN today that affected other browsers. I have been just turning on my browser (Chrome running on Windoze) and coming over to HN already logged in for months now. Just today I had to log in again, which because HN's new emailed link for password updates allowed me to specify a password, has let me choose a memorable password specific to HN. (The former way HN updated passwords by email was to send a new, random password to my email address, as for example when I logged in via a different computer without an HN cookie set.) So far, so good.
- pasbesoin 13y agoMe too. Firefox 20.0.1 on Win XP, at the moment. By comparison, login works fine in Chrome 26.0.1410.64 . P.S. Deleting cookies in Firefox did not help. P.P.S. Firefox Private Browsing window also does not work for me. Chrome continues to work fine (multiple logins, each time using an Incognito window).
- SeanDav 13y agoNot working on Firefox. Tested and working on latest versions of Chrome, Opera and IE8 for Windows XP. Edit: Removing HN cookies (3 of them) made Firefox work again for me.
- lucb1e 13y agoIf you erase your cookies for news.ycombinator.com, does it work then? See the menu: Tools; Preferences; Privacy; Remove individual cookies (or something like that, I translated it).
- lnanek2 13y agoStill annoyed HN doesn't allow logging in via Google any more, myself. The login functionality just seems to get worse and worse every time they touch it.
- emeraldd 13y agoSeems to be working for me in: FF 19 (Really need to rebuild that ...)
- huhtenberg 13y agoAck. Just go back in via IE, thanks for the hint. However I could log back in on my other machine with Firefox after, but only after getting a different external IP from the ISP. My bet is that they are experimenting with some sort of anti-spam/sock-puppet protection thing and it's misfiring.
- MattBearman 13y agoI too had to re-login for the first time in, well ever, today. I'm running Chrome on OSX.
- powertower 13y agoChrome works fine for me. But I can't login via IE9 (Vista SP2) either. Though from the last browser stats share on here, my issue only potentially affects 3 users.
- tlrobinson 13y agoI had to clear my cookies a couple days ago on Chrome to log back in.
- b0rsuk 13y agoWhenever I type in the correct password, I'm redirected but I'm still not logged in. Debian Linux 7.0 Iceweasel 10.0.12 I'm using Konqueror as a workaround.
- EwanToo 13y agoTook a few times of clearing my cookies, then it eventually just worked, no idea why though and I guess it'll stop working again.
- arethuza 13y agoReally glad this wasn't just me.
- darkxanthos 13y agoI was having trouble on Safari/Mac OS X but it's all better now. Thanks!
- jrabone 13y agoChrome on Windows 7 with ABP here - had to disable ABP to be able to log in.
- rurounijones 13y agoCleared cookies on FF in linux - Worked Cleared cookies on FF in windows - Did not work Versions of Firefox were the same, Linux version has various dev related extensions installed but I cannot figure out why this would change things. [EDIT] Site just died for a few minutes with NGINX error pages. Probably HN fixing it.
- ralphael 13y agoWorking for me on FF 20.0.1 / Win 7, after the suggestions to delete HN cookies.
- bobwaycott 13y agoFF20 on Mac works fine for me.
- T-hawk 13y agoNo Opera fans in this thread yet so I'll contribute a report. Opera wasn't logged in to HN when I started the browser this morning, but simply logging in again worked, no cookie clear needed.
- what_ever 13y agoI actually could never log in on Chrome and Chromium and today, suddenly, I was already logged in! It used to work fine on Firefox (don't have it on office machine, so can't check right now).
- pg 13y agoWe've had a bunch of reports of problems logging in. We're investigating.
- buro9 13y agoIt was as if the homepage was cached and wouldn't reflect login state. Accessing a story's comments showed I was logged in, and only then could I return to the home page and it would also show that I was logged in.
- kogir 13y agoI changed header parsing last night to make header name processing case insensitive. Due to an oversight, the first cookie sent was being dropped. As long as your session cookie wasn't first in the cookie header, everything worked fine, which is why I didn't notice (despite testing in Safari, FF, and Chrome). This is also why clearing cookies sometimes worked - it shuffled the order in some browsers. Sorry everyone.
- SiVal 13y agoNo problem, thanks for posting the details instead of just "try it now." It's just a matter of time before I would have done something similar. I appreciate the opportunity to learn from someone ELSE's mistakes for a change---one of the benefits of HN.
- icebraining 13y agoYou should test with elinks: it failed consistently ;)
- threedaymonk 13y agoYou fixed header processing? That's great! I wrote an HTTP proxy server. Every site on the internet I ever tried worked through it except HN, which went into a redirect loop. I investigated (insofar as HN's hair-trigger banning allows such things) and think this was due to the fact that the proxy was normalising header case. If this is fixed, I'll be very happy.
- deleted 13y ago
- mknappen 13y agoNo problem with Firefox 20.0
- lorin_pa 13y agoI used a few different browsers and compared the raw responses. I noticed when I used Firefox (20.0.1 linux), there was an additional redirect to heapanalytics.com. Using Firefox(20.0.1 linux ), I obtained a valid session. It was simply the login status that was displayed incorrectly. I deleted the cookie from heapanalytics.com, refreshed my Hacker News page and the correct login state message displayed (user name followed by logout link). Hope that helps.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoThis is seriously oddpants, but I could not log into HN until clicking on this link, at which point I was automatically logged in.
- schumacher 13y agoNo Problems with FF 20 on Win7 and OS X
- cholko 13y agoI too have not been able to use my original id, I made this one and I can logout / login with it but not my original, shivetya firefox / safari in mountain lion, windows 7 at work was firefox
- msamir 13y agonightly 23 -> no problem