Google and Firefox not playing well together?

June 20, 2012 9:31 AM

Google and Firefox not playing well together?

The past two days I've been running into an issue where when I attempt to use google, my browser slows to a standstill while "connecting" or "waiting" and never actually loads the page, just attempting indefinitely. I'm running the latest Firefox edition, and this happens whether I go through the search bart or directly from the google.com start page (which actually won't itself load for me.)

This doesn't seem to be affecting gmail or youtube or G+, but does mess with some other sites which make use of google analytics, such as Twitter.

Although I am generally useless as diagnostics for these sorts of issues, I decided to try using Safari and see what happened, and google ran just fine (though safari has it's own issues due to being safari and is generally unusable for me) leaving me to believe this is a specifically firefox-related issue. Does anyone know what this is?

posted by Navelgazer to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Have you tried clearing your cookies and/or browser cache in Firefox?
posted by kdar at 9:39 AM on June 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Try disabling all browser extensions and see if that fixes it (http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-remove-add-ons)
posted by jjwiseman at 9:46 AM on June 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Hey! That did it! Thanks! (clearing cookies and browser cache, I mean. Didn't need to try disabling extensions, so don't know whether that would have worked or not.)
posted by Navelgazer at 9:47 AM on June 20, 2012

Actually, let me clarify. Clearing the cache/cookies helped for a second, but as soon as I was signed into gmail the problem started up again exactly as before. disabling my browser extensions then fixed the issue.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:55 AM on June 20, 2012

Quite likely you have a corrupted profile and need to create a new one. Though it's much better than it used to be, this remains the #1 cause of mysterious misbehavior in Mozilla products.
posted by dhartung at 11:22 AM on June 20, 2012 [3 favorites]

Help > troubleshooting > reset profile

This is a much better procedure than the linked article.
posted by gregglind at 6:54 PM on June 20, 2012

Quite right. I have not had to use it since that feature was added, so I forgot it was there.
posted by dhartung at 1:15 AM on June 22, 2012