π 2019-Sep-06 ⬩ βοΈ Ashwin Nanjappa ⬩ π·οΈ tableau ⬩ π Archive
A friend shared a webpage which was supposed to render a Tableau visualization. However, when I opened that URL in my Firefox browser, I got an empty page.
At first, I suspected that one of my many Firefox extensions was blocking the Tableau visualization. I disabled all extensions and the webpage was still empty.
I decided to check out the HTML source of the webpage by right-clicking on the page and choosing View Page Source. I saw that the HTML was pretty simple. The main suspect seemed to be a script
tag that was pulling in a Javascript file from http://tableaureporting.foobar.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js
.
So I suspected that Firefox was not loading this Javascript file for some reason. Why might that be?
Time to break out the Developer Tools in Firefox by pressing F12
. The Console tab showed an error: it had blocked the script due to something called mixed content use. Thankfully, the error message was linked to a Mixed Content page that explained why: I was looking at a HTTPS webpage that was trying to load a Javascript file (active content) from a HTTP URL. To protect me, it was blocking this active content.
So Firefox is protecting me. Thatβs good, but I knew the URL from my friend is safe and I wanted to really see that visualization.
Might there be a security setting that I could disable? Turns out there is. Head over to about:config
in Firefox and toggle the security.mixed_content.block_active_content
setting from default
to false
.
Voila, I could see my Tableau visualization after this!
Tried with: Firefox 68 and Ubuntu 18.04