Blank (gray) screen when connecting to ai2.appinventor.mit.edu

Bugs and Other Issues
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#1

I have several students who get a blank screen when they access ai2.appinventor.mit.edu using Chrome on Chromebooks.
I started about 2 weeks ago. I am not able to reproduce this on desktop or laptop computers.

The page appears to load, but nothing is displayed.
Things I've tried:
Clearing browsing all data
Restarting the Chromebook
Updating Chrome
Forcing re-login (via ai2.appinventor.mit.edu/login)
ai2.appinventor.mit.edu is whitelisted
There are no error messages on the Chrome console, but there is Javascript and html source on the page
they get the gray screen at http://code.appinventor.mit.edu/ too

Any ideas?

#2

Here are some blind guesses ...

  • Script blocker browser add-ons
  • Ad blockers
  • anti-virus web guard
  • Failure to notice an AI2 scroll bar on a large popup pane blocking access to the main site
  • pop up blocker settings
1 Like
#3

I don't have a solution but there might be a similar issue discussed in this haystack of forum chromebook discussions https://community.appinventor.mit.edu/search?q=chromebook .

You might look through these discussions while waiting for others provide you with possibilities.

App Inventor is a web app, so that might have something to do with your issue.

Chromebooks do work with app inventor (at least some of them). See this recent post Chromebook - Can we use MIT App Inventor? . Some chromebook versions evidently have issues w.r.t. App Inventor.

Student on Chromebooks unable to Sign In on Web Page
#4

This turned out to be an iBoss proxy blocking something. Everything started working when we routed traffic to appinventor.mit.edu and ai2.appinventor.mit.edu around it.

Thanks for your input!

2 Likes
#5

If you temporarily turn the proxy back on and let us know what error messages you see under "More Tools" > "Developer Tools" we might be able to figure out what is triggering it on the App Inventor side.