WhatsApp Web can't connect anymore after some time

jmbreuer

I use WhatsApp Web in a dedicated tab - that's how I prefer it for now. (I know that there might be ways to get it into a panel, but that's not what I want for now.)

Because of mostly memory pressure on my machine I've set background tabs to auto-hibernate; including the WhatsApp Web tab (it's not quite as bad as Facebook/Messenger, but it's bad enough that I really want the unloading to work).

Sometimes, especially when the browsing session has some days under its belt, re-activating the WhatsApp Web tab leads to it not being able to connect to the servers:

From there, the only solution I've found is to completely restart Vivaldi. Reloading the tab leads back to exactly this message again. Closing the tab, opening a new one and navigating to web.whatsapp.com as well.

Obviously, having to restart the full browser is... somewhat of an inconvenience to get WA working again.

I've tried to dig around the XHR/WebSockets connections using the dev tools, but I don't see something obvious immediately going wrong.

Am I the only one experiencing this? Any ideas how I could debug this further?

jmbreuer

Ah, forgot to mention: When I click on 'LOG OUT' in the thing shown above, I get to the login page, but the QR code to pair (again) never loads, stuck at the rotating circle segment thing:

DoctorG

tested with 4.2 Snapshot: hibernated background tab of web.whatsapp.com reconnects after some seconds and shows whatsapp overview page with all contacts i had chatted.

jmbreuer

@doctorg it only breaks after some length of session / hibernation cycles. Trying once always works for me, too.

jmbreuer

Recently updated to 4.1.2369.21 (Stable channel) stable (64-bit); still happens exactly as it did with 4.1.2369.11 previously.

On a hunch, I started to dig around in Proxy Settings. That's... weird. OK first of all, Vivaldi on Linux doesn't really allow me to access those directly, nor does it show anywhere what proxy configuration it's actually using.

I installed the SwitchyOmega extension to try things out. When WhatsApp Web was hung / didn't load after resume from hibernate, I toggled SwitchyOmega's proxy setting.

Between:

forced direct connection
"System Proxy Setting" (where I can't figure out what it really is/means/does - my system is intended configured to use network-wide wpad.pac)
that wpad.pac specified manually

In all cases, WhatsApp Web starts working. So the act of switching the proxy configuration "does something", and the proxy (or not) actually used doesn't make a difference.

It's a viable workaround for having to restart the whole browser for me now, I'm leaving that here for posterity to stumble upon.

jmbreuer

I came across this:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=426736

Proxying of WebSockets requests used to work differently from HTTP(s) requests in the Chromium codebase until very recently.

I noticed that I don't see WhatsApp Web's WebSockets requests (as visible using Vivaldi Developer Tools) in the proxy logs, when a proxy is enabled.

This does not explain the problem I'm seeing in full, but different requests from that page being routed differently (and WhatsApp's server possibly implementing some kind of 'origin security') might be part of what's going wrong.