[SOLVED] Not an IcedTea issue after all

[Xhermin]

I've recently begun having trouble logging into my Youtube account from my Mageia box, where it worked previously. I have multiple profiles associated with the account, and what goes wrong is the window where one selects which profile you want active stays completely washed out, never comes into focus nor becomes actually clickable. Haven't encountered any other websites with this problem. My other machines, running other distros, have no such problem with Youtube, having equally up-to-date (11_2_202_297) Flash plugin (or older, in some cases!), so that's not it. This leads me to suspect the other main web underpinning, java. Or in Mageia's case, IcedTea.

Mageia has (in repo): IcedTea6 1.3.2 mageia1.1.mga3-i386. Firefox 17.
My SimplyMEPIS 8.5 (kernel 2.6.36 !!!) box has: IcedTea6(b18) 1.8.13-0+squeeze2. (Debian backport?) Manually upgraded to Firefox 22.0.
My PCLOS 2013 box has: actual Java plugin (1.6.0_45, manual install, a little old and needing update...). Firefox 21 in-repo.

Hm. Maybe Firefox itself? Still, its not *that* old.

Obviously, I could simply drop IcedTea in favor of actual java(tm) on this (Mageia) machine as well, but other people might not regard that as an option. I prefer to stay in-repo as much as possible. The devs have been doing such a good job everywhere else, I hope this isn't too unreasonable a request. Although, now that I think about it, more up-to-date Firefox would be nice, too? In your infinite spare time of course Thank you.

[doktor5000]

Youtube does not use Java nor Flash for the rest of the website apart from the videos, as far as i'm aware.

Did you try the obvious choices first? Clear browser history (cookies, logins, site preferences) and also browser cache?
Did you try some other browsers on your Mageia system for comparison? When did it stop working on your Mageia box? What has happened in between?

Firefox is at the current ESR version, which we're using, you may want to read https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Rel ... il_clients

[Xhermin]

Right, this only happens at the login screen, and only with respect to youtube, other Google pages (gmail, drive) behave perfectly. Been happening for a couple of weeks, my workaround has been to use one of my laptops (the other distros cited) for youtubing. The whole "separate profiles linked to a single email" thing is still fairly new for youtube, honestly, I figured they'd done something with their page code that required bleeding-edge plugins. Yahoo does that all the time.

Your suggestions weren't "obvious", the only other times I've historically had trouble getting into sites was when I let flash and/or java get too out of date. I'll try clearing all that stuff when I get home, I have cleared browswer history before, but not recently. FF is the only browser I have on that machine at this time, I may well install Chrome later, whether I need it as a diagnostic or not. Thanks for the answer, even if it wasn't what I thought it would be..

[doktor5000]

Well, normally with the desktop environment at least one more browser is installed. For KDE that would be konqueror, for GNOME epiphany (IIRC).

[Xhermin]

Looks like clearing browser cache did it; had to actually look up the procedure.

FWIW, Konqueror, Dolphin, and Epiphany are not always useful for troubleshooting FF issues; being mozilla-derived themselves, they call on plugins and resouces from /use/lib/mozilla, /usr/lib/xulrunner, and other system directories referenced by FF. I've seen FF issues visibly impact Konqueror, so when I go for "other browser" especially for comparison, I go completely away from mozilla, either Chrome or Opera.