Opera doesn't want me wasting my time

January 18, 2013 5:32 PM

Opera won't load Facebook on my computer about 75% of the time. It tells me "Internal Communication Error: You tried to access the address http://www.facebook.com/, which is currently unavailable." I am using a Mac. Facebook is not down, and other browsers work fine.

I was excited when I saw this question, but I don't have those lines about Facebook in the output. All I have are the question and answer section lines, but not the hardcoded ip address.

I am not using any extensions. Why won't Opera connect to Facebook? It seems completely random when it will let me connect. A while ago I tried editing my bookmark for Facebook to just be "http://www.facebook.com" so there aren't any weird redirects, it's not going straight to https, etc. Sometimes I will just open another tab, press the same bookmark, and it will connect. Sometimes it won't. Sometimes I try typing it out by hand and it will connect, sometimes it won't. It feels like nothing I'm doing is actually effecting anything, and it's just random.

posted by Nattie to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

If you try going to the https version, does it work any better or more consistently? Facebook redirects to the secured version, and has sometimes refused to load insecure pages.
posted by bookdragoness at 7:16 PM on January 18, 2013

Sorry to ask you to do this, but could you open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and type 'cat /etc/hosts' and let us know the output? Someone else recently had this problem here and it looked like they had some nasty entries in their hosts file.

If you DO see a line or two referring to facebook.com in your hosts file, you can edit the file to remove them which should solve the problem (perhaps after a reboot).
posted by destructive cactus at 8:14 PM on January 18, 2013

Response by poster: It does the same thing, heh.
posted by Nattie at 8:37 PM on January 18, 2013

Response by poster: I said in the original question I had seen that question and those lines weren't there. But here is the output anyway in case it has other information that could be useful:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost

; <>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <>> facebook.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<> ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;facebook.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
facebook.com. 2648 IN A 173.252.100.16

;; Query time: 20 msec
;; SERVER: 71.9.127.107#53(71.9.127.107)
;; WHEN: Fri Jan 18 21:01:33 2013
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 46
posted by Nattie at 9:01 PM on January 18, 2013

Sorry, I'm blind.

Anyhow, I'm assuming Opera is able to load other pages whilst not loading Facebook. Is there anything else that this can correlate to? Are you on a laptop, using it at different locations? Are you on wifi? Does the problem go away if you plug into wired ethernet?

Sorry to recommend the terminal once more, but what happens if you run something like 'ping -c 10 facebook.com' (i.e. ping facebook 10 times) while you're not able to load it in your browser?
posted by destructive cactus at 9:20 PM on January 18, 2013

Response by poster: I am always on my laptop on wifi in the same spot at my house. Plugging it in to wired ethernet doesn't make difference.

When I *can* load Facebook:
PING facebook.com (173.252.100.16): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=0 ttl=237 time=96.430 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=107.566 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=102.218 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=97.447 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=4 ttl=237 time=99.375 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=5 ttl=237 time=100.875 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=6 ttl=237 time=99.122 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=7 ttl=237 time=98.478 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=8 ttl=237 time=101.763 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=9 ttl=237 time=105.038 ms

--- facebook.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 96.430/100.831/107.566/3.275 ms

When I *can't* load Facebook:
PING facebook.com (173.252.100.16): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=0 ttl=237 time=97.377 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=98.561 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=107.518 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=97.930 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=4 ttl=237 time=99.988 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=5 ttl=237 time=98.772 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=6 ttl=237 time=104.406 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=7 ttl=237 time=106.050 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=8 ttl=237 time=100.225 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.100.16: icmp_seq=9 ttl=237 time=97.980 ms

--- facebook.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 97.377/100.881/107.518/3.516 ms

I'm not sure if that helps much, since my other browsers can connect to Facebook, just not Opera. My computer can connect to Facebook in general, as can other computers on the same wifi and wired ethernet, and two smartphones. It's just Opera that won't.
posted by Nattie at 11:21 PM on January 18, 2013

Best answer: This seems to be a recent issue (that I'm also experiencing). As per the last post in this thread, it appears the Opera devs are aware of the problem and are working on it. In the meanwhile, though not an ideal solution, one very temporary fix seems to be restart Opera before trying to access Facebook, or to just stick to using another browser for Facebook until the next update (hopefully) fixes the issue.
posted by kilo hertz at 6:14 AM on January 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

Love opera. Gave it up recently due to flurry of wild problems all over the web. Was using Opera Next. I know it's off topic, a little, but i have been an opera user since back when you had to pay for it. Could not find an easy way to even find other folks in the opera community who were having similar problems. (Now on win7 with much more stable firefox, and some add ons that imitate the best things about opera, like speed dial and tabs. Since moving mostly to gmail, the integrated email client that was its best other feature long ago lost its compelling character, making dumping it easier. I test it from time to time and still get crashes hourly from both next and from current release version. Won't go back. ). You may want to assess if it is time for a change. Again, i love opera. Always fast and leading edge but in the last year, they seem to have lost something critical.
posted by FauxScot at 6:27 PM on January 19, 2013

Response by poster: I changed to Opera because Chrome causes kernal panics on OS X (Apple's fault, not Google's), and my computer had become practically unuseable. I was honestly going like a max of five minutes between kernal panics, so I was getting sick of my computer randomly restarting. It only happens with Chrome and Google admitted that it was an issue, and my memory checks out, so I know it's Chrome causing it. Apple doesn't seem to give a crap about fixing the issue on their end, and apparently there's not much Google can do to fix it.

I really hate Firefox (used to love it before Chrome, I have no idea what happened to make it so terrible since then) and Safari (just terrible). Maybe Firefox is feasible in Windows but it is painfully slow and clunky on my Macbook. Opera has been okay. Honestly I don't really like any of the other browsers but Opera is the closest to Chrome. If I could have it my way Chrome would work and I wouldn't have to use Opera, but I don't seem to have any other options.
posted by Nattie at 7:23 PM on January 19, 2013