Problem

Confluence 6.14 and higher versions were shipped with a new, expanded search panel. 

However, attempting to search in Firefox and Internet Explorer does not seem to work.

Hovering the search bar will give (g, gor /), and entering text will trigger the infinite spinning wheels

The following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log

2019-02-18 17:09:22,192 WARN [http-nio-26141-exec-7] [common.security.jersey.XsrfResourceFilter] passesAdditionalBrowserChecks Additional XSRF checks failed for request: http://localhost:8090/rest/analytics/1.0/publish/bulk , origin: null , referrer: http://mycompany/ , credentials in request: true , allowed via CORS: false
 -- referer: http://mycompany/ | url: /c6141/rest/analytics/1.0/publish/bulk | traceId: 2ddf5db016174aa4 | userName: admin

Diagnosis

The error message shows XSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) warnings. This is logged when the request's origin does not match its target. More information about this here: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection changes in Atlassian REST

Confluence may be running behind a proxy, or SSL, or even port forwarding.

Cause

When running Confluence behind a reverse proxy, Tomcat must be made aware of the reverse proxy - this ensures that responses from Tomcat have the correct hostname information. During the upgrade of Confluence, the HTTP ports used in server.xml are migrated, but nothing else is - so the reverse proxy information will have been lost.

From the Upgrading Confluence notes:

During the upgrade the wizard will migrate following from your existing Confluence installation:

• TCP port values in your server.xml file. 
• Custom values in your confluence-init.properties (confluence.home property) and setenv.sh / setenv.bat files (CATALINA_OPTS or JAVA_OPTS parameters)

Other configurations or customisations (including any other modifications in the server.xml file) are not migrated during the upgrade and need to be reapplied manually. See below for more information.

As a part of the upgrade process, you should ensure that all changes from the defaults are re-applied to the instance for correct operation.

Resolution

Ensure that Confluence has been configured to be aware of the reverse proxy. At a minimum, the proxyName and proxyPort parameters are required. If using HTTPS, the scheme="https" parameter should be included as well. These parameters will need to be added to the HTTP connector that is serving requests.

Example:

This is the default HTTP connector in Confluence 5.8:

<Connector port="8090" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
	maxThreads="200" minSpareThreads="10"
    enableLookups="false" acceptCount="10" debug="0" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
    protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" />

If you were configuring this proxy to be used at https://mycompany.com/ you would configure it like this:

<Connector port="8090" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
	maxThreads="200" minSpareThreads="10"
    enableLookups="false" acceptCount="10" debug="0" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
    protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" 
	proxyName="mycompany.com" proxyPort="443" scheme="https" />

Other issues that's caused by XSRF Check Failed:

• After upgrading Confluence, you are unable to create new pages or spaces