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Tabs sometimes do not load pages when I middle-click on links from website or from bookmarks

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At several occasions, but not in a reproducible manner, when I open pages' links (or bookmarks toolbar's links) using middle-click button (i.e. using "Open Link in a new tab"), the tab opens up, shows the URL it should load, but seems to stop there and never actually loads the website. Sometimes, the URL won't even show up in the omnibar. When this happens, the "Reload current page" is grayed out, so I need to click the omnibar and hit enter to force the URL to load, or click the original link again. Most of the time, reclicking with middle button on the same link works fine again. I did not see any common pattern regarding which links generate this behavior or not, but I will keep trying to find out.

This behavior does occur even in safe-mode (all addons disabled).

At several occasions, but not in a reproducible manner, when I open pages' links (or bookmarks toolbar's links) using middle-click button (i.e. using "Open Link in a new tab"), the tab opens up, shows the URL it should load, but seems to stop there and never actually loads the website. Sometimes, the URL won't even show up in the omnibar. When this happens, the "Reload current page" is grayed out, so I need to click the omnibar and hit enter to force the URL to load, or click the original link again. Most of the time, reclicking with middle button on the same link works fine again. I did not see any common pattern regarding which links generate this behavior or not, but I will keep trying to find out. This behavior does occur even in safe-mode (all addons disabled).

Modified by simon.budin

All Replies (3)

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We're tracking this as a bug, as it's been reported by a handful of people now.

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For what it's worth, and since the issue was still occuring on all versions of Firefox on my PC, I recently deactivated one option in my CCleaner program which cleans up things at start (see image), and the issue seems to have disappeared since that change.

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I see this behavior as well. It seemed to start happening after Firefox changed the DNS server routing. I can't say for certain since I can't figure out how to disable/enable it. However, I have found that closing and trying to reopen new tabs doesn't work, but opening the new link in the old tab does work. If I really want to have multiple tabs open, I need to shut FF down and reopen it.