Websites don't open in Firefox but open in Chrome
This has been an issue for several weeks, maybe even more than a month now for websites that were fairly inconsequential, but now I've noticed more and more websites being affected by this issue. Websites will simply not load, although viewing the connections in TCPView it seems that a connection does seem to be established to the targeted website. Loading the same website URLs in Chrome gives me no issues - they load perfectly fine there.
This issue will persist only until I reboot my computer. Closing Firefox and reopening it does nothing to remedy the problem, nor does updating (from what I remember, this issue has been around since 39.x and I am currently on 49.0.1). And after several hours (sometimes even minutes) the issue comes back and will not go away again until I reboot my computer once more.
For example, puu.sh and gyazo links are fairly hit or miss - depending on the person who uploads them, they may or may not load on Firefox while afflicted with this issue, but Chrome will always be able to open them. This reflects an issue I brought up to this community in the past about being unable to load 3 particular websites - a week or so passed, and they became available again in Firefox. However, this time it seems more permanent, given the amount of time that has passed since Firefox has become unable to load those pages.
I want to say it's a caching issue of some sort - deleting cookies doesn't do anything. But I'm not entirely sure if it is, or if this is a known issue with a different underlying problem. There's always the option of switching to Chrome entirely, but I've used Firefox for as long as I've been online, and I'd like to keep using it since I use Chrome for programming work. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks in advance.
Opaite Mbohovái (6)
Certainly Firefox does cache pages. Have you already tried clearing the cache?
See: How to clear the Firefox cache
If you have a large hard drive, this might take a few minutes. If you do not see the number going down on the page, you can reload it using Ctrl+r to check progress.
A couple other users have reported in recent years that their Firefox would stop loading ALL pages until Windows was restarted. I don't think we ever got to the bottom of that. It sounds as though your problem is a bit different, in that some sites do not work.
Next time that happens, could you try:
(1) Private window, assuming you normally browse in a standard window (2) New profile
New Profile Test
This takes about 3 minutes, plus the time to test those sites. You might want to create shortcuts on your desktop or email yourself the links you plan to test in the new profile, since it won't have your existing history or bookmarks.
Inside Firefox, type or paste about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it.
Click the Create a New Profile button, then click Next. Assign a name like Oct2016, ignore the option to relocate the profile folder, and click the Finish button.
After creating the profile, scroll down to it and click the Set as default profile button below that profile, then scroll back up and click the Restart normally button. (Many of the other buttons are nonfunctional, so please ignore what is under construction.)
Firefox should exit and then start up using the new profile, which will just look brand new.
Can Firefox open pages on those sites in the new profile?
When you are done with the experiment, open the about:profiles page again, click the Set as default profile button for your normal profile, then click the Restart normally button to get back to it.
None of the options you provided seemed to have any effect, unfortunately. Again, they seem to establish a connection but nothing loads in the end.
Could you check Firefox's Network Monitor? When a tab doesn't load, open the Network Monitor in the lower part of the tab and then reload the page and see what kind of response Firefox is getting to requests for the page. A "200" code indicates a successful retrieval, a "304" code indicates that page wasn't changed so Firefox could use a cached version. What kind of requests/response are you seeing?
Chrome has a similar panel you could use for comparison to see where Firefox is stalling out.
- https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/Network_Monitor
- https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/#network
If Firefox isn't requesting all of the same files/content, could you click the "Console" button along the top line of the developer tools panel to see whether there is any explanation there?
I actually get nothing on the network monitor tab. The status remains empty while it tries to load and remains stuck loading the URL, not even getting to any of the files associated with the website. Chrome on the other hand loads instantly with a 200 status.
Hmm, maybe there is a problem with the DNS lookup? Or are you saying Firefox is connecting to the sites but perhaps hesitating in sending requests??
Just in case: you could check for a proxy server problem on the Options page:
"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options
In the left column, click Advanced. On the right side, click the "Network" mini-tab and then the "Settings" button.
The default of "Use system proxy settings" piggybacks on your Windows LAN connection settings, but you could try "No proxy" to see whether that helps.
Turning the proxy off produced nothing different. DNS flushing didn't do anything either.
Something interesting came up when I went over all the recent websites I had issues with and it seems they all use Cloudflare (puu.sh, gyazo, kiwiirc.com, etc.). I'm not sure if that's actually what's causing these problems but it seems plausible, especially since I'd used these services fine before they implemented Cloudflare.