Is it becoming mandatory to connect to a Google account?

[Quinarbre]

Lately (let's say the last few days, but I hadn't played for 2 weeks before that) a tonload of pop-up windows appear while I'm playing BGA (on my PC), asking me to connect to a Google account.
- Why the change? Before that, I think connecting through Google was only an option which I could safely ignore altogether
- I suspect something wrong has happened with the main site framework, because these pop-ups occur when clicking on just about anything: the search game bar, the chat bar, the Tables button, even the wooden background...

That behaviour is easily reproduced using Private navigation, in which you will not be connected to any social network.

[Een]

Connecting with a social login is completely optional.

We haven't changed anything about this, but as with the notable Chrome98 image bug (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=24590&p=106793&hilit=chrome#p106793) we are reminded that some other things may change and impact us.

This issue had actually happened in the past (I remember getting it once myself) but pretty rarely. Best guess I have about it would be that in some cases the Google login library loads really fast before the page is fully loaded, and the event attaches to the whole window instead of the login button because the login button is not there yet. Forcing a refresh would probably solve this.

Since there has been several reports about this I have been made aware of, for the next release I have tried adding some conditions to try to make sure never to attach the event if the target element is not yet available (but I don't have a date yet for that next release).

NB: I haven't been able to reproduce this issue on my computer. If you can reproduce it systematically I would be interested in some more details about your configuration.

[Quinarbre]

Don't worry Manu, I was only joking about the mandatory social login.

Tonight it's gone just like it appeared, suddenly and for no reason...
The only updates to my system overnight were on libc6, locales, libgtk and and gir1.2-gtk.

For the record I'm running Firefox 97.0.1 on a Linux Mint 20.2.
I'll try to document it better if it happens again, do tell if you need some more details.

[Een]

Tonight it's gone just like it appeared, suddenly and for no reason...
The only updates to my system overnight were on libc6, locales, libgtk and and gir1.2-gtk.

There were several reports about this recently, but not so many either. So maybe linked to an update, or maybe something on Google side.

For the record I'm running Firefox 97.0.1 on a Linux Mint 20.2.
I'll try to document it better if it happens again, do tell if you need some more details.

Thanks. Hopefully next release will prevent this altogether. In any case, Google is deprecating the current sign-in libraries in March 2023 so we'll have to rework this with the new identity services library.