Firefox mmmerhahrgh!

Bri

I'm a big fan and all but can anyone help me out?

I have a list of common sites that fail to load in FF, having done so pre-Christmas. This isn't some slight incompatability...I can't load GMail, FF addons page, AIB24hr, Vodafone login, etc. They all time out and most involve a login procedure. Yet I'm browsing the (majority of) the web at lightning speeds as before. I had java, etc. all installed no problem, yet these pages get nothing more than an empty loading bar (gmail always goes half-way and stays?!).

Now I re-installed Firefox and Java - I'm probably missing something here - but having backed up all my bookmarks, etc. FF read my user data and looked as customized as ever. And guess what - the problem of certain pages failing continues.

Please advise as I'm now browsing 50-50 with IE.

P.S. Not sure if this is significant but the firefox GMail notifier fails to login now also.

RicardoSmith

I don't have problems with most of those sites so its a problem on your machine. Maybe its security settings or something. The exception is Vodafone I never got that to work well with either IE or FF. Its just a bad site.

bringitdown

FF addons page?!?! Thats paradoxical!

Sounds like a firewall is blocking scripting or a plugin is acting up.

If you have a firewall disable it for a moment and try GMail - this site is particularly script intensive so if it works your on the way. If that fails, reenable your firewall and tinker with your Firefox security settings, make sure scripting is enabled etc.

To do a CLEAN install of Firefox:
1: Make a backup of your settings / plugins located in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
2: Uninstall Firefox and ensure you remove all the data - it will ask you do you want to remove your profiles etc.
3: Reinstall Firefox.
4: Import settings and bookmarks from the backed up profile folder.

You will loose all the extensions / plugins but you can then add them one by one, seeing if any of them cause the problem.

Bri

Yeah sounds right I've never really suspected it was a flaw in FF as it worked last month. I tried a random site there and went to publicjobs.ie. The pages load fine but once I go to see current jobs (https://www.publicjobs.ie/cand/joblisting_eng.asp) which is https then it times out. I never changed my settings and have FF1.0 with XPSP2.

I just unticked "allow original site to set cookies only" which made no difference.
I also have a new problem with boards not letting me use the 'advanced' features such as adding smiles or coding in a link by pressing the buttons above the text box.

As I said I've reinstalled.

Bri

Ah ha! Ok call me stupid but I've just solved it. Not only do I have my machine's firewall but I'm behind a big external one too. They recently altered the addresses and I guess FF can't auto-detect proxy settings while reading a proxy script. So I did a DIY and gave it one address:port. But I hadn't told it to use the same address for all protocols, as I'm restricted to http here I never thought about doing it because FTP etc. is defunct for me. A simple tick did the trick.

Thanks for the help. I can't believe after all this this is my fault!

jozi

For anyone reading this who needs to reinstal firefox or thunderbird:

There's a program called mazbackup, it lets you backup all your settings, bookmarks, addresses, i think it even made a backup of all e-mails i had when using it.

Jozi