Website is OK on mobile phone but US on desktop

[rans6andrew]

my desktop machine(s) running Linux Mint 18.2 and Firefox browser won't open the website for Trek Bikes UK properly. I have tried disabling all of the Ad-Blockers and Popup Blockers I usually run with to no avail. I normally run in Private mode but have tried running in normal mode and again it doesn't work. What should open with graphics and moving images merely opens with a text presentation and the links within the page largely do nothing. It has been like this since Friday to my knowledge but as I didn't try to access it from either of these machines before then I don't know if the site has ever been OK for them.

Surprisingly, it works properly on my mobile phone, an Android one. I suspect, but can't prove it, that the mobile phone opens up a largely separate set of pages to those that a desktop machine browses.

At the beginning of last week I went to the website on another Linux Mint machine, an old laptop, also running Firefox browser which opened the website as you would expect. I would try it again but the laptop is 5 hours drive away!

I have tried to find something in the Firefox menus to check if I have the latest version of the browser but can't find it. It used to be in "About".

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks,

Rans6.........

[Jhieminga]

You could always try reinstalling Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/linux
First, make a backup of your profile (assuming it works the same way under Linux) so that you can restore that. Start out with a clean install of the latest Firefox, see if the site runs normally, if yes; restore your profile and see if it still works. If not, there is something in your profile (Add-ons most likely) that is messing up the site.

I just had a look at that site, it is quite image and video heavy, but after a delay in loading it does work here. The mobile version may be a different page or a different layout based on CSS, using fewer or smaller images. That is common these days.

[ve3id]

Works OK for me using SuSe linux leap 15.2 and chrome. Got the UK website with lots of motion and corks popping and then it re-directed me to the Canadian web site.

[rans6andrew]

The Trek UK website still works on my lowest performance Linux Mint machine, an ancient Dell laptop. This machine is running a slightly newer version of Mint, 18.3 than the other two machines so that may be significant.

Rans6......

[cattletruck]

There's been a recent major revision of the ECMAScript (also called JavaScript) security standards which many websites and the latest web browsers have adopted. This means that for not-so-old web browsers many web sites are now broken (you should be able to see the javascript error in the browser console). Your choices are to either upgrade to the latest web browser, or use an ancient web browser and hope the web site developers have catered for both old and new. Unfortunately not-so-old web browsers are currently not being catered for.

This issue is an annoying pain. In my case to upgrade my Safari browser to the latest version I need to install a whole heap of MacOSX patches before I can upgrade Safari. It's easier to just download and install Firefox until I get around to scrubbing the disk and installing the latest MacOSX rather patching the old one.

[jimjim1]

In the event of any web site oddities it is always worth clearing cache and deleting cookies. You can delete just the individual site cookies but you may have difficulty tracking them all down - I am not an expert. If you delete cookies you may lose any saved login details for any site you delete the cookies for.