Trouble Viewing NWN in Google Chrome? Clear Private Data!

New World Notes' kudos to Galatea Gynoid and Dupe Dollinger, who separately offered a solution to my Google Chrome woes. If you're unable to display NWN in Chrome, hit the wrench icon, select Clear browsing data, expunge it all, and hit refresh. In case you're interested, Ms. Gynoid has a savvy technical explanation of why this corrects the issue:

"It would appear that the webserver is bombing while attempting to process the request," she wrote in Comments. "There are scripts running on the webserver that are attempting to process information passed from the browser to the server on each request, and they must have a bug that's causing them to bomb under certain circumstances. I was having the exact same problem for about a week... Whatever data is was getting back from the browser was, either alone or in combination with the data in your backend database it was attempting to correlate that with, causing the webserver to terminate mid-processing. This isn't an obvious problem since webservers spawn many subprocesses to handle requests, and if one dies it just spawns a new one so people can still connect, but it kills the one request that was in progress when the crash occurred."

If you're still having problems even after trying this, do let me know.

Comments

[Adric Antfarm]

Great, now you need to figure mine out.

Driving me crazy. I may need to check and see if they have an update, but I should be on the current release.

http://www.adric.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/nwnerror.jpg

I could try Netscape I guess.

[Hamlet Au]

Huh, weird. "www" isn't actually in the URL address, does it work without 'em?

[Adric Antfarm]

Jokes over Hamlet. Using ten year old programs has it limit man. Surprisingly, Mosaic doesn't open much of anything.

After getting stuck in an airport without a laptop connection last week and falling back on that tiny cruel device that is my phone, I can report NWN comes up fine in Opera Mobile and (like everything else) painfully slow and evil in IE.

http://www.adric.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/nwnbj2.jpg

[Archie Lukas]

BTW, despite claims to the contrary
The Reg measured browser impact on a typical PC.

Google chrome may be termed 'lite' but it uses nearly the same resources as the infamous system hogger Internet Explorer 7

The faster one was Firefox 3.5, followed by Opera and Safari.

I my opinion, as a pro; forget Google chrome.
use Firefox, the new features make it vastly superior.

[Valiant Westland]

I regularly use both the current release of Firefox and IE8 and test each new browser option for compatibility, speed, etc. In my experience, both the latest generation of Firefox and IE8 as well as Chrome have virtually identical performance characteristics. This seems to be the consensus of all those who have done more formal testing.

What bothers me about Chrome is the way it is licensed and architected. Although many people don't read license agreements, I do. Did you know that Google Chrome installs updates without prompting the user for approval and that this behavior is explicitly permitted by the license agreement?

The architecture of Chrome is such that it installs itself into a user directory with full permissions. Obviously one reason for doing this is to facilitate the silent updates. The problem with this is; any successful exploit could modify the Chrome install directory, regardless of user class. It could change proxy server settings, install 3rd party plug-ins and who knows what else, all without the user being aware it was happening.

Some people have an unreasonable need to promote and idolize things that are new, hip or in the case of software, simply Google rather than Microsoft. Blindly idolizing Google and Chrome in the same way people have idolized Michael Jackson is a mistake. A closer inspection of Chrome and its license agreement might not leave you so "thrilled."

[Dupe Dollinger]

I'm glad you got it all fixed up Hamlet!
When you first responded, you said that clearing history & cookies didn't help. But after seeing that you ended up fixing it on the second attempt, I realized that there are several ways to clear data in Chrome. There is the usual cookies, history, passwords and forms, but also a drop box giving you the option for the past day, week, or everything. I'm guessing you didn't have it at "everything" on your first attempt!

[Odysseus Fairymeadow]

I guess the next step is to ask your webmaster why the webserver appears to be "bombing" with these requests. If there is a consistent repro, then this could be less than impossible and only a major headache to track down...