A new customer reported a particular feature was broken. This feature used a web browser (Chromium) to work.
A developer spent ages trying to work out what was going on and realised that the site had an invalid proxy script. The invalid script was causing a crash within Chromium, rendering this feature completely unusable.
Due to a typo in their proxy script, their proxy wasn’t blocking access as described by the script; it was basically “anything goes”.
The developer told them how to fix it, and we thought it would be case-closed. However, now that the proxy blocked access to websites as defined by their IT department, their employees started complaining.
Instead of the IT department:
- tweaking the rules,
- Disabling the script completely
- or simply informing their staff that these sites were blocked according to their company policy
They decided to revert back to the original broken script. This obviously made our software break again.
Really, it was a problem with Chromium, the software used in Google Chrome and now Microsoft Edge. Obviously, the workaround is to actually set a valid proxy script, but they decided to be awkward.
Stranger Coding Tings 