Cool VL Viewer forum

URL links in chat are no longer working. They work in 1.30.2.35, but not in .36 or 1.31.0.14. I never tried 1.31.0.13.

Care to elaborate ?...

I have no trouble here with URLs in chat. Beside, there has been strictly no change in URL handling between 1.30.2.35 and 1.30.2.36. The only change, for Linux, was an update from CEF118 to CEF119, but that won't change how URLs are dealt with in the viewer itself.

Please, at the very minimum, give precise repro steps.

On 1.31.0.14 in Linux, URLs open just fine except for the occasional, poorly crafted URL in a message/notice.

For example, in The Weekly Limited group for 2023-11-06, a URL showed up with the word Limo prepended resulting in: showing up in the browser. This caused a search for that string vs navigation.

I have also see the periodic use of unicode arrow type characters (->), at the beginning of the link, which cause the handler URL and the URL to handle being concatenated into a single request.

There is, sadly, no reliable solution around this issue: if people do not take care to prepend and, even more critical, to append their URLs with a space, they will likely be misinterpreted...

I just tried again. I open a chat window and enter https://www.osgrid.org/ I changed to use the internal browser and it works fine, but will not open the default browser.

It works just fine for me (with either Pale Moon or Firefox as the system browser)...

Perhaps is your default system browser using CEF ?... In this case, it might use the viewer's pre-loaded CEF library (instead of loading its own) and fail, because of some incompatibility (different version than the one it uses ?).

In any case, this is not something I can change: the Cool VL Viewer used to load libcef.so only when an internal browser was in use (unlike all other viewers that always have a hidden, lingering web plugin loaded, to "speed up" initial web page opening with the web plugin), but with CEF 119, this won't work any more (see the change log as to why).

URL malfunctioning for me as well since couple of versions back.
CVLV set to open system default browser, which is FireFox.
Clicking an URL looks like it is going to open he page in the browser, but that never happens.
I don't know if the viewer, firefox or something in between is the issue.
Links from other applications opens in FF a expected.

Minor inconvenience as copy an paste works
I thought I'd mention it in any case, for reference^^

Please, provide precise version and repro steps: however hard I try here, I never encounter any such issue... Cannot reproduce so far, and no change in the viewer code that could, even remotely, explain this.

I could reproduce the issue on my arm64 SBC: it is due to the Linux distribution running an older nss library than the one used to build CEF (the arm64 builds use Spotify's automated builds, which build system has been using nss v3.82, while my Linux arm64 distro got only v3.68).

Apparently, the fact that the CEF library is loaded causes the invoked browser to use a libnssutil function that was absent from older nss releases, causing the browser to abort since it cannot load the corresponding library version...

To fix this issue, you could upgrade your libnss library to v3.82 or newer...

I found the solution... Apparently, libcef.so is not properly linked and is re-exporting the function names for libraries it was statically linked against (among which libnssutil.a), causing this mess.

Since, with CEF v119, and because of its insane thread local storage usage, I added the preloading of libcef.so before starting the viewer, this preloading (achieved via Linux' LD_PRELOAD environment variable), is also propagated to any program (wanted, for media plugins) or script (unneeded/unwanted) it spawns...

The fix is simply to add "unset LD_PRELOAD" in the wrapper scripts used to launch third party programs; for the system browser, this line must be added near the start (but after the shebang line) of the bin/launch_url.sh script, like so:



This fix will be part of next release.