Search page goes blank after 15 seconds in Firefox

[gihrig]

I open https://search.nixos.org/packages. The page displays as expected, but 15 seconds later goes blank.

Continued from #699 This is a different issue than #699. There is no error shown in the Firefox console. And the issue occurs in a private (incognito) page.

Reproduction:
macOS Monterey 12.7.5
Firefox 126.0

1. Open a new tab and paste https://search.nixos.org/packages Enter. The normal search page appears.
2. Add a trailing slash https://search.nixos.org/packages/ Enter. A blank white page appears.
3. Remove the trailing slash https://search.nixos.org/packages Enter. A blank black page with footer "Please help us improve the search ..." appears.
4. 15 seconds later the footer disappears.

After a bit of digging, it seems that Ghostery ad/tracker blocker is triggering the loss of display.

Ghostery displays a tracker count banner in Firefox. This banner appears as a small overlay on the lower right corner of the screen showing a count of trackers detected and blocked. The banner does not appear on "https://search.nixos.org/packages" because there are no trackers, but the page is blanked all the same.

The banner is removed after 15 seconds. It's then that the "https://search.nixos.org/packages" page goes blank.

The issue does not appear in Safari even with Ghostery enabled. Ghostery does not display the banner in Safari.

If Ghostery is disabled in Firefox the page displays as expected, but the trailing slash still results in a blank page.

The Ghostery banner can be disabled and this eliminates the issue.

So this issue could be written off as an incompatible Firefox extension, but I think there is room for the argument that this behavior (blank page with trailing slash) is odd and marginally 'broken' on the part of the search.nixos.org page.

I'm reporting this for future reference and in case anyone is inclined to look into it.