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element-hq / element-web

A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web.
https://element.io
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Compatibility check does not point out source of incompatibility in case of missing/disabled webaudio API #28153

Open mpeter50 opened 2 weeks ago

mpeter50 commented 2 weeks ago

Steps to reproduce

  1. I'm starting with a Firefox-based browser with no webpages open. It's dom.webaudio.enabled about:config settings has happened to be false
  2. I have navigated to https://app.element.io/
  3. The webapp tells there is a compatibility issue with my browser, but does not tell what is that
  4. I click the "Continue anyway" button
  5. The webapp shows the unsupported browser page, but does not tell why is that

Outcome

What did you expect?

A short (or longer, when more information would be useful) description that Element could not access the browser's WebAudio API. An error message you got could also be useful to be displayed for the generic case.

What happened instead?

The webapp did not tell the reason of incompatibility.

Additional information

According to #27864, you have already implemented such a feature, but it seems there may be something preventing it from working. I have mentioned the issue there earlier, but did not get a response about whether this is expected or unexpected behavior, so I have opened this issue in the belief that this is unexpected behavior.

I expect that the incompatibility in this case is the missing WebAudio API, because if I enable it in about:config the webapp will load fine.

Operating system

Windows

Browser information

Firefox

URL for webapp

https://app.element.io/

Application version

No response

Homeserver

No response

Will you send logs?

No

mpeter50 commented 2 weeks ago

Screenshots about how the webapp looks like at the 3rd and 5th points:

Compatibility warning page Failure page
image image
t3chguy commented 2 weeks ago

The designers explicitly did not want any UI to show exactly what feature is missing, nor can we realistically get translations for all the various things which can be missing.

mpeter50 commented 2 weeks ago

The designers explicitly did not want any UI to show exactly what feature is missing

What is the reason behind that? Would it help if this information was only shown in a default-collapsed menu?

I think it would be useful to have this because it can be actionable by the user. Incompatibility can not only be caused by old software, but also by disabled features, like this one. For example, if the user has disabled webaudio support because of the fingerprinting possibility on any website, with the understanding that they are fine without web calls, seeing that it causes a problem here can make them to consider to switch it on again, and to approach this fingerprintability problem in a different way.

This does not only apply to the current webaudio api thing, but generally to other incompatibility cases too.

nor can we realistically get translations for all the various things which can be missing.

I see. Do we need translations, though? I would expect that if the user does not immediately understand what "WebAudio API is not available" means and what to do to fix it, they would need to reach for external help to resolve such an issue anyway. What I wanted to say is that I think it may not be useful to translate this, kind of similarly to log messages.

This way, the added value of this would be that the problem is unambiguous, and the user does not need to dive in the logs, where several other warnings, maybe error level messages too are visible. The external help would also not need to try to get the user to look at the logs, and forward them somehow, either.

t3chguy commented 2 weeks ago

I see. Do we need translations, though?

Yes, multiple customers require translatability for all parts of the app