Re: Problems with https://manpages.debian.org/
On Sun 24 Jun 2018 at 09:23:13 (+0900), John Crawley wrote:
> On 2018-06-24 03:18, Richard Owlett wrote:
> >For the past couple of weeks I've had problems connecting to
> >https://manpages.debian.org/ .
>
> Usually these days (last couple of months?) when I click a link in
> Firefox pointing to an online Debian manpage it takes a very long
> time to load, and sometimes drops out.
> OTOH if I paste the address directly in the address bar it opens
> immediately.
When you say "click a link in Firefox", the address that the link
points to is often very different from what you may think. For
example, if you're on a Google search results page (I've used
"debian man apt"), one of the top hits points at
https://linux.die.net/man/8/apt (in green, under the link),
and the status bar shows that address (at the bottom of the page),
but the link actually goes to
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiX2fDzjOvbAhUCY6wKHdPsA-AQFghUMAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Flinux.die.net%2Fman%2F8%2Fapt&usg=AOvVaw1qYRaYckElVn8OyErQkgTb
which means that google goes through a whole load of machinations
before it actually goes off to where you wanted it to.
Having clicked on the link (with either mouse button), the status
bar will now automagically show the real (long) address instead of
the desired (short) one like it did before.
When I can get away with it, I have a habit of copying the location of
the links that point at files, and using my wgt bash function which
throws away the everything up to "url=", translates the % sequences,
and leaves me to rubout the trailing noise (&usg=AOvVaw1qYRaYckElVn8OyErQkgTb
in my example). wgt finishes by calling wget. If you're lucky, the
file is downloaded along with its metadata.
> I assumed it's a Firefox problem, though it's only the Debian site,
> and left it on my to-do list...
Difficult for me to judge. I do have over 13000 hostnames in /etc/hosts
which I hope has an accelerating effect on loading pages (though I
think it's why I can't click on google's paid links).
Cheers,
David.
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