GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 771856
Google Plus won't load
Last modified: 2016-10-16 02:34:54 UTC
I keep getting a 404 page not found when going to plus.google.com. In another browser the site loads fine.
Can you post a screenshot please? 404 is a really odd error to get. What version of WebKit do you have (check the About dialog)? (Google+ is working fine for me.)
Created attachment 336116 [details] Screenshot of 404 issue
Oh wow, it's really a 404 page. Hm, this might be impossible to debug. Most likely it's a problem on Google's end, I'm afraid. You could try filing a bug report, but they'll probably ignore you. Let's rule out any possibility of a user agent issue, it's the only thing I can think of. Try this to match mine exactly: $ gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/602.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Safari/602.1 Epiphany/3.20.3' Then restart Epiphany, see if it works then. Reset it when you're done testing: $ gsettings reset org.gnome.Epiphany user-agent Also, it's unlikely this will help, but check the web inspector (right click -> Inspect Element) to look for any red errors; probably there will be nothing useful because anything wrong with the page would occur before Google decided to show you a 404 page. Also try running Epiphany in a terminal in the off chance there are any useful warnings (very unlikely).
Also it sounds dumb, but try clearing cookies I guess? I actually installed elementary to test this, but I was able to log in to Google Plus just fine, so guess it's not a user agent problem....
Yeah, I haven't had this problem sicne I installed elementary, it's just been in the last few days. So strange. Thanks for helping me try to figure it out. I ran your suggested gsettings command, but that didn't help at all. However I cleared cookies and cache and now it is working! It doesn't give me the 404 error and loads the page. Still doesn't solve the problem of why it did that in the first place, but at least I can get to Google Plus without getting into a different browser.
OK so I spoke too soon. Epiphany rendered the page, but as soon as I signed in with my Google account, it went back to showing the original 404 message!! This is the same Google account I have used for years (paid account) and I have used it in the past, on Plus, with Epiphany, without this issue, but I wonder if it is a Google problem of some sort... They are also having that OAuth issue with Pidgin messenger's Hangouts plugin, but that's probably not related (although the timeframe roughly matches...)
We need Google to investigate, I think, since we don't have anything to go on here. I really doubt there is a bug in how WebKit handles cookies; that might be the only thing I'm confident WebKit does properly, but cookies are pretty simple. So you can contact Google and ask them to respond here, but they won't and I'll eventually have to close this bug. Sorry. :(
I know "me too" comments aren't appropriate, but since nobody else has commented, and I don't want Anthony to think he's losing his mind (you're not alone, Anthony!), I also have this issue on two different computers (work and personal). Both are running Debian unstable, Epiphany (Web) 3.22.0, WebKit 2.14.0, although it was also happening with Epiphany 3.20.x (and possible even before that, I can't be sure, as I only recently started to try and migrate to Epiphany).
Actually, I do have something more to contribute to this bug report than a "me too". It only affects Google Apps accounts. My personal email and my work email are both Google Apps accounts emails (i.e. they are not @gmail.com email addresses). Earlier today I created a regular @gmail.com email address to test with and Google Plus loads (at work). This evening I had my girlfriend login to Google Plus with her regular @gmail.com email address and Google Plus loads fine (at home). Anthony, I'm assuming you are also using a Google Apps account to access Google Plus? (This would probably explain why it's not a very prevalent issue.)
So to make any progress on this, we really need an analysis from a Google+ developer. So I'll leave this bug in the NEEDINFO state for now, until the next time I close NEEDINFO bugs.
I just found https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109576, maybe it's that?
Good news. It appears the latest update to Gnome 3.22.1 (Epiphany/Web 3.22.1, WebKit 2.14.1) has fixed this issue. Google Plus is now loading for both of my Google Apps accounts!
All we changed was the user agent; I thought we had already ruled that out. :/ OK, whatever. Please reopen if someone else still has this issue.