Firefox DNS Issues

January 18, 2005 1:53 PM

re: Firefox ... lately, I've been having weird DNS issues. I don't recall it ever happened before I switched to firefox, so I assume it's to blame, though that may be a red herring. What happens is this : I have several pages listed in my homepage setting, with each url separated by a '|'. 12 of em to be exact. More than occasionally, anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 of them come up with a "server cannot be found" error. Sometimes, if I wait for all of the tabs to open, and then try to load the previously not found page, it'll open successfully. Other times, it just doesn't come up no matter how or when I refresh. I've tried resetting my nameserver settings on my router -- both hard-coded nameserver spec. and 'get nameserver information from isp,' but the problem persists.
posted by crunchland to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I wonder if our problems are related...
posted by amandaudoff at 2:14 PM on January 18, 2005

I have this on my WinME laptop. I tried to load eight web sites at once with FireFox, and ME didn't like that very much. (750MHz laptop, I think it's a 256MB RAM, about four years old)


Loading these same bookmarks on my desktop is completed quickly and without complaint.

I think that your 12 simultaneous-open bookmark pages are a little too much for your machine
posted by seawallrunner at 2:33 PM on January 18, 2005

You might have some success by disabling IPv6 (scroll down to the post by SpeedyGonsales)
posted by blag at 3:54 PM on January 18, 2005

i've been noticing a lot more dns problems in the last few months ... i use firefox, but i'm not sure it has anything to do with that ... could it be that name-servers are getting overloaded these days?
posted by pyramid termite at 5:29 PM on January 18, 2005

Windows probably is caching failed (or timed-out) DNS lookups, which means that negative responses are stored along with successful lookups. On W2K (and presumably XP), there's a registry key you can change so that *only* successful DNS lookups are cached. If the popups are almost instantaneous, this might be what's going on. Try here for an XP tip. Dunno about ME, though.
posted by trondant at 8:15 PM on January 18, 2005