Oh yeah no worries. There are a few things that could be happening that would prevent the feature from working. I have the same suspicion as you – that the TV Internet App is freezing the webpage to save on resources (which would prevent Force Refresh from making calls to the API). Since TVs generally don’t have the most powerful CPUs or RAM, it would makes sense that its doing this as a compromise between having Internet features without having to supply the normal hardware guts. It would also explain the timing, since the client that checks for the most up-to-date version of the side hasn’t been updated recently. It’s possible that an update to the TV either introduce a bug or began throttling the CPU/implemented some resource savings features. I’m leaning towards this because there are two scenarios that come to mind that would result in this behavior:
An issue with Force Refresh returning the updated site version
Force Refresh works by periodically reaching out to the API and comparing the version in the browser to the version stored on server, which changes every time you request a refresh. In this scenario, if the browser reaches out to the API and the API doesn’t return a version, or returns the wrong version, the browser will decide not to refresh because it will only refresh if the API version doesn’t match the current version. Based on testing with your computer, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
The browser does not periodically reach out to the API
If, for whatever reason, the client-side code does not check with the API based on the refresh interval then, of course, it will never actually check what the current version of the site is. If the browser prevents this call from happening, or kills the execution of events from setTimeout, then there’s no real way for this plugin to function since it’s effectively preventing code execution after the page is fully loaded.
Without seeing the logs from the TV, there’s not a ton I can do to see why that Internet app isn’t executing the code. If I had the browser engine and some way to emulate it, I could try and see what’s going on but these closed systems aren’t the best to work with. The other thing I could do is to log inbound calls to the API to see if we can check if the TV is even making the calls to the API but I suspect that’d just confirm what we’re assuming at this point, which is that no calls are being made to the API.
Do you mind sending the TV make and model? I was going to do some searching to see if there was anything else I could find out about the browser engine running things behind the scenes.
