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1.1. How to Make Sure Your Browser Has the Latest Evergreen Updates

Last Updated 11/16/2023

When we go through upgrades or make changes to the Evergreen code, it can cause problems for your web browser. Your web browser tries to be efficient by holding on to the code it gets to run Evergreen and only periodically making sure that the code it has for Evergreen is up to date. If we make code changes to Evergreen, like an upgrade, your browser may have a mix of old code and new code that causes it to malfunction. There are two strategies to make sure you're not encountering these sort of problems.

First A Test

The first troubleshooting trick with this sort of thing is to log in to Evergreen in incognito mode on your browser and see if there is different behavior there.

To log in to Evergreen in incognito mode, you'll need to register your workstation again because your browser is asking for a completely new copy of the Evergreen code and won't remember any of your settings or information it was saving. If the problem you were seeing in Evergreen is fixed by accessing Evergreen in incognito mode, that's an indication that your normal non-incognito browser is storing Evergreen code from before the upgrade and getting confused by the mix of old code and new code. 

There's two strategies to fix that: a Hard Reload or Clear Site Data. 

Hard Reload

A Hard Reload (Crtl + Shift + R) asks your web browser to re-download every JavaScript file, image, text file, etc.

Clear Site Data

A more reliable way to start clean is to Clear Site Data. To do so, hit the F12 key on your keyboard while you have Evergreen open in your browser. This will pop up the Developer Tools window to the right side of the content you're looking at in your browser. There are tabs across the top of the Developer Tools. If you click on the Application tab, you'll see an button to "Clear site data"  

The downside to this "nuclear option" is that it will blow away some of the Evergreen settings that are stored in your browser's local memory like grid column settings. Clear Site Data will also erase any offline transactions that your browser is holding onto, so be sure to process your offline transactions (or download them) before choosing to Clear Site Data after an upgrade.

Console Errors

Another helpful tool for troubleshooting problems in Evergreen is the Chrome Console. This is another section available in Chrome's Developer Tools. To access it, hit the F12 key while you have Evergreen open and choose the Console tab from the top bar. You may need to hit the >> button to scroll through the tabs if Console isn't showing. 

Sending in a screenshot of the errors in the Console tab can be a great clue for the Cardinal team to track down issues you're experiencing. Instructions on how to screenshot can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-snipping-tool-to-capture-screenshots-00246869-1843-655f-f220-97299b865f6b

"White Screen of Death"

The "White Screen of Death" is where the top green bar shows, but the screen below it was blank. Our first step in troubleshooting was to work through some documentation created by Mobius and Georgia Pines on how to address the issue.

https://pines.georgialibraries.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=admin:workstations:troubleshooting

We learned that an older version of Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge were the only web browsers that would sometimes allow brief access to the 3.1 test environment. (Chrome is the recommended browser.) 

We confirmed that both Firefox and Chrome were updated and using the most recent versions. We confirmed that Hatch was installed and enabled. We confirmed that the Java Runtime Environment was up to date. 

We went through the steps in Georgia Pines' documentations and cleared the cache and cookies, refreshing the screens (Ctrl + Shift + R) and restarting web browsers. Still no success. 

Next, we opened the Chrome browser console (F12) to see if we could find any error messages that would point us in the right direction of the issue. We saw several error messages about access to next.nccardinal.org:7682 (which indicates port 7682). After looking at the firewall configuration we were able to conclude that although port 7682 had been opened on their firewall, the Intrusion Protection System thought that the traffic on port 7682 was a security threat. The Library System was able to determine that the issue was tied to Application Control in the Sonicwall, specifically under the Proxy Access category Encrypted Key Exchange. Once they were able to point the category to exclude the Content Filter Allowed Domains list, the issue was resolved.

Try doing a hard refresh by clicking on the F12 button which brings up developer tools on the right side of the screen (ignore that). Right click on the refresh button next to the little home icon on the upper left of the browser window and select Empty Cache and Hard Reload.

A last-resort method for dealing with Hatch issues is to clear out your Google AppData. Users have found that the white screen issue was resolved after they deleted C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google.