I've been having this issue for quite some time, where websites viewed through webkit-based browsers inconsistently load images. By inconsistent, I mean that on one trial run, an image, or several images will load successfully, only to have others that will not. On another trial run of that very same website, the images that didn't load previously will suddenly load --only to have the ones that previously did load, suddenly not load. This behavior is so non-linear that I am having extreme difficulties finding out the source of the issue. I notice that this problem is replicable with browsers such as jumanji
, dwb
, and vimperator
. I believe the common factor amongst all of these browsers is that they use webkit
. Repeatedly reloading the webpage will sometimes produce a result where all resources are loaded correctly.
Here is a screenshot of described behavior (from the webkit-based luakit
):
As you can see these are two failed images, that illustrate common behavior here. I cannot replicate this issue with browsers such as firefox or chrome (which I believe use gecko
and blink
respectively). If I right-click on the image/element and open it in a new window, I am able to view the image with no problems. I am running Arch Linux kernel 3.12.9-1-ck. Any help/insight as to what might be happening would be much appreciated. Thank you.
UPDATE: Every broken image, when inspected as an element by debugging console in luakit outputs something of this general form:
GET [web address here] Cannot resolve hostname [domain here]
UPDATE 2: I tried installing luakit
on a virtualbox installation of kali-linux
that I have on my system (debian-based) via apt-get install luakit
, and interesting result ... No symptoms of unresolved hostnames/broken images/failed resources. Browsing is also comparatively faster in this virtual environment.
Solution:
Following the suggestion proposed by @harrymc (using Google public DNS) has completely destroyed all symptoms of poor page loading. According to @harrymc, it is due to faulty/slow DNS, and/or poor DNS caching strategies. More specifically, what caused this problem was a poor DNS, and what appears to be a rather hasty time-out protocol built into the webkit
engine. These two factors are a recipe for disaster.
A More Open-Ended Thought-Arc:
One other conclusion is the inefficiency of Webkit browsers in that they issue multiple DNS queries for the same website, rather than remembering the first query. Another conclusion is that the ISP's DNS server apparently sometimes cannot handle multiple parallel requests (since the browser probably handles multiple images in parallel via threads), perhaps because they now have more clients but not enough DNS servers. --harrymc
luakit
anduzbl
(both Webkit-based) work without issue. Are you running an ad-blocking script that could cause that?luakit
, nor fordwb
. Keep in mind: the same images that won't load as in the picture above will show up later if I reload (after an indefinite amount of reloads).dig
from thednsutils
package.