Once every few days, all songs keep skipping for a few hours. CORS errors.

[ExperimentalCyborg]

Once every few days, the spotify web player will skip all songs i'm trying to play saying "spotify can't play this right now". Nothing on my pc or browser has changed between times when it does and does not work. Restarting the browser does not help. DRM is enabled and works fine on other websites. Audio playback works fine on other websites.

Technical details:
I'm using FF 121.0 (64-bit) on linux mint (fully up to date stable channel).
I'm getting a ton of CORS errors in the console whenever this happens. See screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ygd8ZVN.png Sometimes some playlists/songs work while others don't (maybe they're cached?). Sometimes i can't find anything that works at all.

[ExperimentalCyborg]

Extra context: In the screenshot of the browser console, you can see a console.log("page is loaded now"). I put that there when the page finished loading, and directly after i clicked play on one of the playlists on the home screen. The yellow "source map error" right after the console.log happened before i clicked play. I'm not using any "privacy" or ad blocking plugins on the spotify web player. i have ublock origin installed, but spotify is whitelisted.

[Joan]

Hi there @ExperimentalCyborg,

Thanks for reaching out. Is there any pattern as to when this happens and when it doesn't or is it purely intermittent? Also, does it happen on other browsers such as Chromium?

Let us know how it goes.

[ExperimentalCyborg]

I have not detected a pattern so far. I'll switch browsers for a while and report back when it happens in chromium as well.

[Susan_GP]

Hi @ExperimentalCyborg,

Thanks for your reply.

Take your time to test it out. We'll be here.

Cheers!

[ExperimentalCyborg]

I've been alternating between Chromium and FireFox every other day, and it seems that this issue does not happen on Chromium.

Something very interesting though is that if the bug happens on FF, playing some Spotify music through Chromium even for a second will make FF start working too. I doubt it has something to do with DNS caching since both browsers use a different DNS service, FF is configured to use Cloudflare. while Chromium is using whatever is the default for it (Google or my ISP, i'm not sure). I will configure FF DNS to use my ISP and I'll report back if Cloudflare caused some weird issues somehow.

TL;DR it seems there's a weird interaction between FireFox and either the DNS, the network path or Spotify CDN. Not sure which yet.

[ExperimentalCyborg]

The thing where chromium plays also fixed Firefox plays stopped working, it might have been a fluke. Firefox is giving me

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://seektables.scdn.co/seektable/f9a92c9769e1384104a9aaad8148ff23bfc77f21.json. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 400.

these CORS errors again.

To me it seems like one of the CDN routes/servers is misconfigured and Chrome is simply less strict than Firefox when it comes to CORS.

[ExperimentalCyborg]

Still a problem on firefox 123.0 (64-bit)

[MartinT]

Hello @ExperimentalCyborg, 

Thank you for taking the time to troubleshoot and for letting us know of your findings.

We agree that this seems to be some type of issue in the set up around Firefox. We have spotted that the issue does seem to be intermittent according to most reports that we have gotten and can get resolved by starting playback on a different device or browser. 

We'd advise to keep the browser up to date as to not miss any updates on the functionality of Spotify web.

Cheers.