iOS 17.2.x Safari breaks Mangadex's image loading scripts

[SoraKagami]

Attempting to read any manga from Mangadex on an iOS 17.2.0 -> 17.2.1 iPhone with Safari will frequently result in images not loading properly on Mangadex (and often, other manga websites too).

Symptoms​

Typically the first few images will load correctly, while images further down will become stuck with the orange circular loading icon until it times out and turns into the load image button. Sometimes even the first few images will also fail to load.

Other websites that are not manga-serving-websites do not exhibit this issue.
Issue persists independent of the network used (Wifi and cellular data).
Windows PCs on the same Wifi network do not have this issue.

Workarounds​

"Requesting" a desktop version of Mangadex via Safari may temporarily fix the problem for one or two chapters.

Multiple reload attempts are often needed to try and get images to load (both orange circle-of-wait and clicking the load-image button that may show up). Unfortunately this results in wasted bandwidth from Mangadex's servers/network.

Affected Hardware/OS​

iPhone 11 running iOS 17.2.1
This issue was first observed on iOS 17.1.x, possibly as early as 17.0.x. Unsure if this problem was present during iOS 16.x.

 

[BraveDude8]

If you've seen it through multiple versions of iOS, across many different websites, it's more likely to be an issue with your internet than your browser. No reported issues with Safari 15/16/17 that aren't tied to content blockers breaking things.

Prodded some iOS users to get them to test it.

 

[tristan9]

Works fine on 17.2.1 here. Most likely if the device is old and the chapter very heavy it runs out of memory.

Typically more likely to happen on mangadex because we serve non-compressed images and try to preload the entire chapter.

Go into your settings and enable data-saver mode. If it fixes the issue it’s most likely that.

 

[SoraKagami]

Thank you for testing it out!
I thought it was an iOS 17 vs Mangadex issue and didn't consider my phone running low on RAM.

Will give that a try and report back after a few days.

 

[SoraKagami]

Posting to confirm that turning on data-saver did indeed fix the image loading issues on Mangadex. Thank you very much @tristan9 and @BraveDude8

For anyone else using an iPhone (or iPad) with 4GBs of RAM (i.e iPhone 11) and running into something similar, the above suggestion by tristan9 (data saver -> on) worked for me.