Why can't I sign into the Google Services using the Epiphany browser?

When I go to accounts.google.com in Gnome's Epiphany, I get an error message that reads:

Oops! Something went wrong while displaying this page. Please reload or visit a different page to continue.

Why would I get this message? Is it a page rendering issue? This is happening for me on multiple computers running Epiphany on Gnome on Debian 8.

I am able to sign in successfully on other browsers (Iceweasel and Chromium).

Steps to reproduce: 1. On a computer running Debian 8, install Epiphany (using the package manager of your choice, or by running apt install epiphany-browser) 2. Launch "Web" and navigate to http://google.com and clicking the Sign In button. 3. Watch it fail.

Questionmark

Posted 2016-03-22T14:21:08.003

Reputation: 421

try https://myaccount.google.com

– SeanClt – 2016-03-22T15:35:11.960

@SeanClt I can go there successfully, but when I get to the point where I need to sign in, I have the same issue... Any other ideas? – Questionmark – 2016-03-22T15:39:15.447

FWIW, I can reproduce it on a fresh user account on a fresh jessie install. – Tobia Tesan – 2016-04-22T17:20:47.607

You may want to keep an eye on https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=822261

– Tobia Tesan – 2016-04-23T10:48:33.317

Answers

I am one of the Epiphany developers. This error message means that the WebKitWebProcess that WebKit uses to render the page contents has crashed. It is a bug in WebKit. Normally, to report a WebKit crash you would get a backtrace following these instructions and then report the crash on WebKit Bugzilla. Unfortunately, because Debian Jessie ships with an old, unsupported, and very insecure version of WebKit, you don't want to do that; we don't want reports about ancient bugs so we'd just close the bug report. Tobia did the best-possible thing by reporting a Debian bug, but it's extremely unlikely to be fixed unless the bug is reported upstream, and it can't be reported upstream. So what to do?

Install a newer version of WebKit from Debian Backports! This bug was fixed upstream years ago and updating WebKit should make the problem go away.

Michael C.

Posted 2016-03-22T14:21:08.003

Reputation: 136

Debian sure is slow to get updates from upstream... Nowadays, I would have known to check the Backports -- you really can learn a lot in 6 months! Thanks for your work on developing this! – Questionmark – 2016-10-20T18:28:19.077

Unfortunately it seems like the answer is to just not use it.

Michael C's answer describes a backports solution. However, the jessie-backports have the same behaviour.

According to the release notes for Jessie, at least in terms of security, any browser other than Chromium using WebKit is unsupported because of the difficulty in backporting fixes:

https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#browser-security

Dan Keast

Posted 2016-03-22T14:21:08.003

Reputation: 21

This issue has become a problem with Wheezy, but I didn't realize that it also applies to Jessie. Thanks. – fixer1234 – 2016-10-21T19:38:13.710