Why does Firefox load pages without the CSS?

April 19, 2010 9:31 AM

Why does Firefox load pages without the CSS? If I refresh, it will usually load normally, but sometimes not. This happens across a wide range of sites. Screenshot 1, screenshot 2. FF 3.6.3 on Windows XP.
posted by desjardins to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I know that when this sometimes happens on MeFi it can be due to the fact that we serve the stylesheets from a different machine than the main pages (or we have in the past, I'm not totally sure if we're doing this now). So if there's some sort of lag or problem with loading that web address, FF may give you the page without the stylesheet.
posted by jessamyn at 9:40 AM on April 19, 2010

I don't have an answer for you, but Chrome often does this too and it's quite annoying. When I looked for answers for Chrome, I found some people suggesting turning off "DNS pre-fetching" - which seemed to make a difference for a while but things are back to usual and I may just have imagined that it helped at all.

Anyway I do wonder if it's just something to do with speed. Chrome is very fast (imho) and sometimes it just acts like it can't wait for all that CSS.
posted by mondaygreens at 9:41 AM on April 19, 2010

I have the same problem with Firefox & CSS, namely @font-face. Firefox loads the ugly default font and shows that for a second then suddenly loads the new font. Drives me nuts.

Last I checked, it had been filed as a Firefox bug.

Here's one solution that might help you (it's about stylesheets in general even though it talks about @font-face). I'm sure there are others.
posted by circular at 9:46 AM on April 19, 2010

Are you browsing at work or school? A lot of institutions/companies have "transparent" proxies that intercept your HTTP requests and serve content from their local store (saves on their egress bandwidth cost). If, for some reason, the transparent proxy is screwing up you could be missing some stylesheets.
posted by sbutler at 9:47 AM on April 19, 2010

I get this occasionally on Firefox/Mac. I just chalk it up to the CSS file not loading for some reason (perhaps the reason Jessamyn provided, or maybe the servers are just getting hammered at that moment?) A refresh usually does the trick.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:55 AM on April 19, 2010

Response by poster: Are you browsing at work or school?

No, this is from my home desktop, connected to cable by a wireless modem.
posted by desjardins at 10:11 AM on April 19, 2010

This was happening to me, and was very frustrating.

Changing my DNS solved it.

I'm not sure why, but I suspect it was a speed issue in which my connection/browser did not respond properly within the time window allotted for the CSS by the DNS.
posted by jamjam at 11:03 AM on April 19, 2010

i don't have a solution for you, but this happens to me on one specific computer with only metafilter (and subsites). takes 30-45 seconds (or longer) to load any page in the metafilter.com umbrella and when it does, no CSS.
posted by nadawi at 4:34 PM on April 20, 2010

this happens to me all the time lately, but only with wordpress sites. sometimes even refreshing doesn't help.
posted by eleutheria at 5:10 PM on April 20, 2010