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brave / brave-browser

Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.
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RSS-feed icon on `ci.brave.com` shows sources which soon disappear #35462

Open stephendonner opened 8 months ago

stephendonner commented 8 months ago

Description

RSS-feed icon on ci.brave.com shows sources which soon disappear

This is very much related to https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/34227, but is more pronounced, in that the user has no viable sources, so this whole user experience leads to literally nothing

Steps to Reproduce

  1. install 1.64.6
  2. launch Brave
  3. open a new-tab page
  4. scroll down
  5. click on Turn on Brave News
  6. load ci.brave.com
  7. log in
  8. click on the RSS-feed icon in the URL bar
  9. watch it closely
  10. (it gets whittled down to 0 sources)
  11. now, shift+reload this page

Actual result:

The RSS-feed icon disappears completely

news-icon-flicker

example example example
Screen Shot 2024-01-19 at 7 04 49 PM Screen Shot 2024-01-19 at 7 04 52 PM Screen Shot 2024-01-19 at 7 04 58 PM

Expected result:

We should tweak the code to not show and then quickly hide these unavailable sources...

Reproduces how often:

100%

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave | 1.64.6 Chromium: 121.0.6167.75 (Official Build) nightly (x86_64)
-- | --
Revision | a5446236342885c92184f41597b3c37296a1887c
OS | macOS Version 11.7.10 (Build 20G1427)

Version/Channel Information:

Miscellaneous Information:

cc @fallaciousreasoning @rebron @brave/qa-team

stephendonner commented 8 months ago

This isn't a recent regression - goes back as far as 

Brave | 1.61.120 Chromium: 120.0.6099.234 (Official Build) (x86_64)
-- | --
Revision | 362207c81bff0740a8b6cff62dd91c6789f5698f
OS | macOS Version 11.7.10 (Build 20G1427)
1.61.120 1.61.120
Screen Shot 2024-01-19 at 6 58 57 PM Screen Shot 2024-01-19 at 6 59 05 PM
fallaciousreasoning commented 8 months ago

Similar root cause here I think - the cookies aren't sent to the RSS feed URL, so it 404s

fallaciousreasoning commented 8 months ago

Okay, so I had a play around with this and got it working - unfortunately it's using a session cookie, so next time you reload the browser, the feed won't work until you reload the page. There's not really a way for us to detect this, so I actually think what we do is more or less best case, given that:

  1. We don't want to request the RSS feeds until the user clicks the button
  2. We can't provide a good UX when the user has subscribed to the feed (as they won't get any articles in that feed until they visit ci.brave.com).

Maybe we should just have a piece of UX that says "No valid feeds" or something once we realise everything is invalid?

stephendonner commented 8 months ago

Okay, so I had a play around with this and got it working - unfortunately it's using a session cookie, so next time you reload the browser, the feed won't work until you reload the page. There's not really a way for us to detect this, so I actually think what we do is more or less best case, given that:

  1. We don't want to request the RSS feeds until the user clicks the button
  2. We can't provide a good UX when the user has subscribed to the feed (as they won't get any articles in that feed until they visit ci.brave.com).

Maybe we should just have a piece of UX that says "No valid feeds" or something once we realise everything is invalid?

How do other RSS-feed clients handle this case?

fallaciousreasoning commented 8 months ago

Most other RSS-feed clients won't detect the feed, as they don't have the cookies to see the feeds in the first place:

image