Regression Report - Permessage Deflate Header

[jsjoeio]

Table of Contents

• Background
• Impact
  • Timing
  • Root Cause
    • Example
  • Suggested Actions

Background

We recently introduced support for the permessage-deflate header which is used in the handshake to indicate whether a connection should use compression. This is not supported in all client browsers.

Impact

Users who upgraded to 3.9.2 and using a browser/environment where permessage-deflate is not support could not access code-server.

Timing

Event	Date	Link	Author
Introduced At	2021-03-10	#2846	@code-asher
Reported At	2020-03-25	#2975	@springhack
Resolved At	2020-03-29	#2993	@code-asher

Root Cause

@jsjoeio approved #2846. We didn't test on other browsers and for some reason, adding it in the list of extensions (even without enabling it) broke browsers for reasons still unknown. We thought the browser would ignore things it doesn't support, which was not the case.

This lead to users using upgrading and then the new change breaking code-server in their environments.

1. This feature is not supported on all browsers.
   1. Our end-to-end tests should run on all major browsers using playwright.

Suggested Actions

• Run end-to-end tests on all browsers (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox)
  • Enable tests to run on Safari and Firefox: [dev]: enable end-to-end test suite on Safari and Firefox #2998