Like a disaffected grad student, for some reason my firefox won't finish

May 25, 2007 9:12 AM

I like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy. But after a dozen google searches and innumerable hours spent on tech boards I'm stumped. The last few images on every web page I go to will NOT load. What gives?

Like I said, usually I'll follow whatever instruction I'm given online and it clears stuff up. But for this one, no one really seems to have a clear answer

-I have a 2 month old superfast inspiron e1405 with a 4mb cache and all the ram I could fit in it
-I have vista
-I have firefox
-I have mcCafee
-I've uninstalled every firefox add-on but tabmixplus, foxmarks, download statusbar, IEtab, foxytunes and talkback. It's still happening.
-The problem happens whether I'm on crappy coffee shop wireless or on my superfast LAN at work
-If I right click on any picture it appears instantly
-IN possibly related news, it takes up to 15 minutes for my google reader to finish loading.
-pages seem to load pretty quickly initially and then just stall out, sometimes indefinitely, in the latter portion of loading


So what gives? Any ideas people?

posted by rileyray3000 to Computers & Internet (22 answers total)

spyware?
posted by jozxyqk at 9:22 AM on May 25, 2007

This happens on EVERY webpage? I was thinking if it's just one particular page, try firefox extension Web Developer and turn off all scripts to see what happens...
posted by rocfob at 9:30 AM on May 25, 2007

I know IE7 is evil, but does it do the same thing? The question is whether this is a Firefox issue or something deeper.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:33 AM on May 25, 2007

Does it happen with Internet Explorer too? Try uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, not just the add-ons.
posted by mand0 at 9:34 AM on May 25, 2007

You can run Firefox from winkey+r with a -P option and it'll start the profile manager.... try a clean profile (NO extensions, no custom settings) and see if it still happens. My first guess is that it's something in your about:config but it's easier to know if a clean profile fixes it before you go digging.
posted by anaelith at 9:40 AM on May 25, 2007

Response by poster: well IE7 seems a little slower overall but it's MUCH faster loading than firefox
posted by rileyray3000 at 9:44 AM on May 25, 2007

Response by poster: And it's on MOST webpages. Not all but definitely the majority of them. As far as spyware goes, I've got windows defender and it did a spyware search this morning and I came up clean
posted by rileyray3000 at 9:46 AM on May 25, 2007

ZoneAlarm was blocking a whole mess of images for me a while back. Turned out it was trying to block ads (and it thought some non-ad images were ads).
posted by iguanapolitico at 9:59 AM on May 25, 2007

another firefox extension that can prove to be useful is livehttpheader - maybe it will hel you see what's blocked when by what.
posted by Baud at 10:06 AM on May 25, 2007

Does your macaffee have some kind of spyware protection?

If right-clicking brings it up, maybe the mouse focus is forcing it to redraw that area. Perhaps update the video drivers or shut down video acceleration to troubleshoot.

Install all updated drivers from dell.

Maybe its the extensions. Remove them all. If that doestn work, wipe your firefox profile and make a new one.

How is your connection to those webservers. Run ping -t yahoo.com (or wherever). If you are losing any packets you have a network problem.

What does task manager say? Is there a process at 100%?

Does IE do the same thing?
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:34 AM on May 25, 2007

Must be something to do with your cache. Clear it, increase it, shrink it, whatever.
posted by humblepigeon at 11:10 AM on May 25, 2007

It could be Vista's new networking stack is giving you problems. As Vista's still pretty new I don't have any advice in that arena but it would be worth looking into.
posted by chairface at 1:41 PM on May 25, 2007

Response by poster: OKay so far I have

1) Uninstalled all my add-ons
2) Uninstalled then reinstalled firefox
3) Ran a speed test

it came back with:

3259 kb/s download and 2350 kb/s upload with 90 ms latency and a server less than 50 miles away.

I go to a google image search and it still takes 15 minutes to load most of the images on the page
posted by rileyray3000 at 2:13 PM on May 25, 2007

That's not your connection, that's the way google image search sucks. Google doesn't actually store thumbnails of the images on the page any longer, it just hot links them to the original image--full size--so your computer has to download the entire (full size) image and then resize it..... it really ticks me off, a lot, unspeakably.
posted by anaelith at 2:14 PM on May 25, 2007

Response by poster: Well it's never been that way before. But I also tried some other sites.

On Amazon it takes 10 minutes to load half of the pictures related to a particular sneaker.
posted by rileyray3000 at 2:25 PM on May 25, 2007

A friend had something similar happen, where pages would take AGES to load, and in his case it was a firewall conflict issue.

When you say "I have mcCafee", what does that mean? Does it include a software firewall? If it does, make sure that you turned off the Windows Firewall that comes pre-installed with Vista. Having more than one software firewall can cause conflicts and all kinds of weird issues.

To check if it's a firewall issue, you can test it by turning off your McAfee firewall briefly and reloading a page where you are having issues. Just make sure to turn it right back on afterwards.
posted by gemmy at 3:45 PM on May 25, 2007

Have you by any chance tweaked Firefox to allow more simultaneous connections per server? That's a common "speed hack" that will sometimes bite back. The problem is that some web servers, Apache comes to mind, will refuse simultaneous connections above a certain number.
posted by shinybeast at 8:36 PM on May 25, 2007

You still need to tell us if it does the same thing in IE, and in firefox -p. Do obvious tests first, then start messing about with firewalls and adblockers.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 9:52 PM on May 25, 2007

Could be a DNS caching issue. Start -> Run:
ipconfig /flushdns
posted by spiderskull at 12:36 AM on May 26, 2007

Could it be a NAT issue? Sometimes goofy/overloaded NATs can lose track of TCP/IP connections.

Are you having trouble downloading large files?

I think modern HTTP is clever and tries to use a single TCP/IP connection for an entire page download if it can.

I don't have any particular insight as to how to test for this, (maybe try using your machine one someone else's network or with someone else's router, or, if you're brave and/or stupid, without a NAT box at all?)
posted by blenderfish at 5:38 PM on May 26, 2007

Oh, damn. Didn't RTFQ fully. Sorry.
posted by blenderfish at 5:39 PM on May 26, 2007

I have similar troubles, and it seems maybe related to a lack of space on my primary drive, which would maybe affect the memory cache. But I'm asking more than saying, if you take my meaning (I ain't no xpert).
posted by Goofyy at 6:47 AM on May 27, 2007