Fastly.net (partial) breaks functionality on spanishdict.com

[mileskrell]

Type: ruleset issue

Domain: spanishdict.com

Steps to reproduce:

1. Visit http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/video with HTTPS Everywhere enabled
2. Click the button labelled "Spanish to English"
3. Observe that the button is nonfunctional
4. Disable the "Fastly.net (partial)" rule
5. Click the button again
6. Observe that the button now functions as expected

[patrickdark]

I'm having similar issues in Firefox Developer Edition 60.0b1 with HTTPS Everywhere 2018.02.26:

• The "Menu" button at the top-left does nothing when clicked.
• The "á" button in the "Translate" button text field does nothing when clicked.
• The "Spanish to English" tab does nothing when clicked.
• Inline search suggestions for "Translate" button text field do not appear.
• Content for "Word-by-word translation" pages never appears. (This type of translation occurs for terms that aren't in the dictionary such as "brand new"; see, for example, http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/brand%20new.)

The issues seem to be mitigated by disabling the "Fastly.net (partial)" rule.

Edit: I sent a feedback message to SpanishDict asking them to use HTTPS, which should moot this issue.

[nanek]

Hi, thanks for reporting this. I looked into this previously and opened #12579, however I'm not sure how to resolve.

I work at SpanishDict and would love to see this fixed in HTTPS everywhere. As noted in #12579 it likely effects lots of other sites using fastly.

[patrickdark]

For the record, I got in touch with a SpanishDict representative shortly after I posted here and they informed me that the site uses HTTPS for login pages, but deliberately does not do so for the rest of their website because they rely on advertising for revenue and at least one of their advertisers is incompatible with HTTPS.

That advertiser doesn't seem to be fastly.net though (as one might guess) since https://weather.com/, which also invokes that rule, seems to work fine with the "Fastly.net (partial)" rule enabled.

[Bisaloo]

@nanek, even if you are not ready to switch the whole website to HTTPS, could you use HTTPS for resources from fastly.net? It will likely solve this issue.

[nanek]

@Bisaloo Agreed, this would fix the issue. Unfortunately last we tested HTTPS for assets it increased our site load time. HTTPS is something we plan to revisit later this year with Fastly's http/2 endpoints, however in the meantime I'm making a PR for consideration to exclude our fastly domain from the rule to avoid breaking our site in the meantime.

[gloomy-ghost]

massive close per #15157