Lately I cannot access the forum on my Mac. Maybe the last two weeks. I just get a blank screen with the headers. I have no issues on my phone and iPad.
Note that my Mac is a 2013 Pro using macOS Catalina. It is considered “Vintage” by Apple…. I have no problems with any other websites. I restarted the computer and it didn’t make a difference.
I am fairly techy but not smart enough to figure this out.
Any ideas?
Have you tried other browsers, like Edge or Chrome? Also - this might be insultingly obvious - but have you updated all your software, at least what you can update?
Also, it can pay to clear the cache:
I had a problem scrolling through the forum on Safari for a while. Switching to Chrome solved it for me
Thanks for reminding me to try Chrome and I can access the forum that way.
I cleared my cache but it didn’t help on Safari.
I am in a #1stWorldProblem limbo as I try to decide whether to get a new laptop or just live with an iPad. I bought a Zagg keyboard to go with my iPad Pro and it definitely makes the iPad heavier and less portable. But typing is much easier.
Since I don’t write much on my blog anymore and don’t rarely do graphics with Adobe, I probably don’t need a laptop.
But I find an MacBook Air to maybe be a more elegant addition to my life compared to an iPad with a keyboard. I would probably like the Apple Magic keyboard better than the Zagg keyboard but it is just as heavy and costs $275 compared to $86.
Thanks for your help!
I work in technology as a software developer so suffer from too many devices, but for my iPad Pro, I only have a case, but have it configured to connect to either my desktop laptop/keyboard or an old Apple wireless keyboard/mouse, if I need to type seriously. That keeps it light, and since I would be at home if I were typing heavily - I could go to a coffee shop, but COVID - I would only need to pair it.
I’ve given away lots of hardware over the years, but like many people, accrue peripherals and cables, although in this case the keyboards and mice come in handy.
It seems to me that whoever runs this board, should make a priority of figuring out what has changed and fix it. I can’t read this forum on either browser I use on my ipad (safari and firefox). And I don’t want or need to install yet another browser. So I basically never read this site anymore, since almost all of my browsing is on my ipad. And I know that I am not alone in this, so surely this change has lessened the amount of traffic to your site.
This change was made at tudiabetes and not on all of our home computers. So if tudiabetes wants to keep reaching their audience, they should figure it out and fix it.
How odd…and frustrating! I am not having any problems with this site on my iPad with OS 15.5 but did have to delete and reload the Discourse app for another group.
I just google this site and have no problem getting it on my iPad. I guess that involves another step, but it doesn’t bother me.
I am one of the tech helpers in a volunteer program with its own intranet. Our intranet opened fresh January 2020. We have found that anything Mac before 2015 can have access problems but also as others have said, Chrome can or may bail you out for a while.
Whoever builds a site usually has a browser preference even though it should be accessible to all the main browsers.
In our case, Chrome is the main one because the state preference is google. But many use Safari and a few use Firefox, the latter having tried to upgrade itself the last couple years and I do like it.
I am on a Macbook Pro 2018. I can’t tolerate the iPad or even Mac Air but then I use Word/Excel/Powerpoint and google drive docs and sheets all.
So for you, Laddie, Chrome for now but the time is coming when the operating system won’t upgrade adequately for you. A new Mac OS was begun in 2015 and another entirely different OS in 2020. I am nearing a new purchase but the prices are insane.
Everything you say about my Mac is correct. As I consider whether or not to get a new laptop, I just got a keyboard for my iPad and that solves a lot of my problems. Since I don’t work on my blog much anymore and don’t do graphics work anymore, I probably don’t need a MacBook. So I can get this website through Chrome on my Mac and through Safari on my iPad. And I guess that is good enough….
I’m on a new Mac using Safari with out issues.
If your computer is vintage then likely your version of Safari is out of date and this website probably doesn’t support a browser that old.
Yes, my Mac is ineligible for the newest iOS. This is the only website that I can’t access on Safari and of course it used to work. But since I don’t really need a new laptop, I am certainly not going to buy one just to access Tu Diabetes on Safari. Chrome works.
This is the main point. The builders of tudiabetes have introduced an incompatibility with older ipads, and if they want to keep their market active, then they should fix it. No website should expect that users will upgrade their hardware OR software just so they can access one website.
Yes, I could buy a new ipad or install Chrome. But my old ipad works correctly for every other website I have tried it on. And I already use duckduckgo instead of google because of google’s pervasive data mining, so I’m not going to use their Chrome browser to give them a back door into all the same data.
Just to be clear, up to a month ago the older Safari/Firefox/MacOS worked fine on the tuDiabetes website. The change happened here, at tuDiabetes. And it should be fixed here, unless tuDiabetes in only interested in supporting viewers running with the latest hardware and software.
I work as a software developer, building websites, desktop applications, web services, and add-ins at a major cancer center, and although I strive for broad compatibility, that is not always possible and is not the sole discretion of the developers. Sometimes it is the browser, sometimes it is the libraries used to build the software, and those can have their own quirks and issues.
As an example, some medical software packages are using features that date back to Internet Explorer, and won’t run on anything else. Right now, there are workarounds, but that at times involve compromises. Because of that dependence on IE, and the need to support medical programs, SharePoint intranet sites wouldn’t display properly. There were changes made that enabled some folk to run the programs that were IE-dependent in Edge, while the default browser was either Edge or Chrome. Making this worse is that IE is no longer supported by Microsoft, no longer receives updates, and is itself a source of security risks. To get all this to work together requires both highly technical solutions, and staff with the requisite skills, as well as a limitation in what applications and platforms are supported.
Granted, there might be solutions to get this to work on older browsers but that harkens back to the days when every browser required tweaks to display properly. The flip side is that might not be easy to implement, depending on how they have architected their site. Also, much software development is built in an incremental, ‘agile’, mode, which leads to prioritizing some work over others, so it might be on their radar to address, but they just haven’t gotten to that backlog issue yet.
Also, I wouldn’t be too quick to blame the site owners/developers. Yes, it might be something they can fix, but Safari was updated in mid-March, and @Laddie wrote that she was having problem since the beginning of May.
I don’t know how quickly she updates software. I update most of mine daily, others simply auto-update, others I need to open the program to see the change - these are ones I work in and don’t want to close to update - but others might not be so diligent.
I work as a software developer also, developing hardware device drivers for custom hardware, programming in C++, C, assembly language. We need to support multiple OS’s, Windows, Linux and proprietary. And we need to support old, sometimes ancient hardware. I am well aware of the difficulty of maintaining compatibility with multiple sometimes aged test platforms. But that is part of the job.
There are a LOT of people who do their web browsing on ipads or other apple hardware. And not everyone has the money or interest in upgrading their hardware every couple years. We had customers who kept their hardware for decades - once something is working a customer needs a real incentive to upgrade.
If a company (I’m talking tuD here) doesn’t care about supporting customers with older hardware then that is certainly their right. But I’m not sure the developers who keep this forum going even realize that there is a problem. I’m writing this on my desktop, but there are a lot of forum users who don’t have multiple hardware or software platforms available to them, and they can’t even report that they have been denied access for the last month. I would assume that traffic simply went down a month ago or so, and maybe that was not noticed?
And you are incorrect that this could be due to a Safari update on our machines - it is the older versions of iOS/Safari that cannot update that are having the problem, not the other way around. It is true that it may not be the site itself that changed - it could be the provider of their forum software. I don’t know what company that is, but I’m pretty sure the forum was not developed in-house by tuD. Anyway, the tuD administrators should know all this, and should certainly be able to figure out what the problem is, once they know there is a problem.
(Hopefully they at least do know there is a problem now).
I can’t update my 2012 Mac to the current Mac iOS. Too old. I am still using Catalina which works fine for what I do. I have always had minor glitches with TuDiabetes on my Apple Devices, but nothing major until the current issue with Safari on the Mac. Sometimes I think it might be a good idea to just use Chrome on all of my devices, especially since I always use Chrome on our Windows desktop. But it would take some organization and work to completely switch and I am not that interested.
@Laddie - I was wondering when you had updated Safari, as opposed to Catalina. The Safari update was in March, and I wondered how much after that release you updated Safari.
For myself, I actually prefer Edge, Microsoft’s variation on Chrome. It uses the same underlying browser engine, Chromium, but changes some implementations and just feels ‘cleaner’, less cluttered.
I was a web developer for 8 years. The forum software likely supports > 99% of user browsers.
If you have a version of Safari that is several years old you might be in a very small % of users and not with the level of effort to support that old browser.
Chrome follows its own support schedule so even on an older MacOS they might update Chrome longer than Apple updates Safari.
I wouldn’t advocate you buy a new laptop is Chrome is working for you, use that. If that stops try Firefox.
At some point you will have to get a new computer or accept more and more websites won’t work as expected.
Safari is the number two most used browser in the world behind Chrome. It is preinstalled and used almost exclusively on all iOS devices, and is the most used browser worldwide on tablet devices from all manufacturers due to the massive market share of ipads. I don’t know whether your guess that most everyone throws out their working tablets and other apple devices after a few years is correct, but my intuition is that you are certainly not correct. These devices are expensive, and have a long life in the secondary market.
Given these facts, it would make sense for a website like tuD to prioritize testing on Chrome, with versions of Safari a close second. Failure to do so, and locking out all users of older Apple equipment, does not seem to me to be a smart decision.
