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website is loading white and text boxes everywhere and alignment is off

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When going to facebook.com or yahoo.com and other sites I get a white page with writing on the left and everything on the left. This happened after I did a reset on firefox. I also cleared the cache and still not working. I can get to cnn.com fine and page looks fine. Also if I load this site I am posting on it is so messy I cant do anything. I have also uninstalled and re-installed firefox.

When going to facebook.com or yahoo.com and other sites I get a white page with writing on the left and everything on the left. This happened after I did a reset on firefox. I also cleared the cache and still not working. I can get to cnn.com fine and page looks fine. Also if I load this site I am posting on it is so messy I can''t do anything. I have also uninstalled and re-installed firefox.

All Replies (7)

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One possible reason for this is an issue with SSL certificates. The Reset feature removes any certificate exceptions you might have stored in Firefox in the past.

Has Firefox given any warnings about certificates on secure sites since the reset? If so, in case they are caused by malware, we definitely should try to get to the bottom of those. Please let us know the situation for more information.


Separate thought: after a Reset, Firefox does a fresh search of your system for add-ons, and something you disabled in the past might be enabled again.

Could you check your Add-ons page and disable everything that you don't really need, or don't recognize? You can open that using either:

  • Ctrl+Shift+a
  • "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column:

  • click Plugins.

To disable, change "Always Activate" to "Never Activate". If you want to have the option to use the plugin on a site-by-site basis, choose "Ask to Activate".

  • click Extensions.

Does anything here look familiar/important? If not, disable.

Usually a link will appear above at least one disabled extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.

Does that change your ability to use Facebook and Yahoo?

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If clearing cookies didn't help then it is possible that the cookies.sqlite file that stores the cookies got corrupted.

  • Rename (or delete) cookies.sqlite (cookies.sqlite.old) and delete other present cookies files like cookies.sqlite-journal in the Firefox profile folder in case the file cookies.sqlite got corrupted.

You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:

  • Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)

You can remove all data stored in Firefox from a specific domain via "Forget About This Site" in the right-click context menu of an history entry ("History > Show All History" or "View > Sidebar > History") or via the about:permissions page.

Using "Forget About This Site" will remove all data stored in Firefox from that domain like bookmarks, cookies, passwords, cache, history, and exceptions, so be cautious and if you have a password or other data from that domain that you do not want to lose then make sure to backup this data or make a note.

You can't recover from this 'forget' unless you have a backup of the involved files.

It doesn't have any lasting effect, so if you revisit such a 'forgotten' website then data from that website will be saved once again.

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Tried both things. I don't have many add-ins, however I removed some. I also renamed the "cookies.sqlite" folder, didn't see the cookies.sqlite-journal listed. I also did the forget this site. Getting the same issue.

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Are there any notification icons on the left end of the address bar? For example, a "shield" or a triangle with an exclamation point instead of a padlock?

Facebook uses the Akamai network for the style sheets in the login page. Are you able to load any of these directly? For example:

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None, when i clicked on those links I had to install certificates and install them. They came up as just like a notepad with just texts on the webpage. After I did that, Facebook opened fine. Yahoo.com opened the same was as before.

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Let me rephrase that. Facebook opened up. However, I can't see any pictures at all. No photos. Seems I am missing a plugin possibly? Take a look.

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Hi anoble1, what do you mean by "I had to install certificates and install them"? I mentioned before that certificate errors could be caused by malware intercepting your secure connections, so this is very important to investigate.

In particular, I want to know the issuer of those certificates. Visit one of those links again and click the padlock icon on the toolbar. This should drop down a little panel where you can click More Information. That will call up the Page Info dialog with the Security panel selected. Click View Certificate and then let us know what is listed in the "Issued by" section.

I've attached a screen shot showing what I see here in California. Because Akamai is a global content distribution network, it's possible there are regional differences.