Why is Firefox randomly ignoring style on websites?
December 10, 2010 10:21 PM Subscribe
Why is my Firefox only rendering style sometimes on some web pages? It renders only plain text on first load and applies style on second or third refresh.
When I visit a few sites (my tumblr site, facebook, IGN, metafilter) all I see is a white background with plain text links. After a refresh or two, the style applies itself correctly. Here is an album of what it looks like when the style doesn't load. Refreshing usually fixes, but sometimes I have to open the site again in a new tab.
I've reinstalled firefox, disabled all my plug-ins, and restarted the computer, but the problem persists. It's been going on for about a week. Pages load fine in Chrome, and I have no proxy settings. This is on a fairly new install of Windows 7. I have no redirects, worms, or malware that I can detect with the usual tools. It just isn't catching the CSS on the first go round.
And yes, I could probably go to the FF support forums (searches yield no similar problems), I'm just keeping it in the family for the first try here.
When I visit a few sites (my tumblr site, facebook, IGN, metafilter) all I see is a white background with plain text links. After a refresh or two, the style applies itself correctly. Here is an album of what it looks like when the style doesn't load. Refreshing usually fixes, but sometimes I have to open the site again in a new tab.
I've reinstalled firefox, disabled all my plug-ins, and restarted the computer, but the problem persists. It's been going on for about a week. Pages load fine in Chrome, and I have no proxy settings. This is on a fairly new install of Windows 7. I have no redirects, worms, or malware that I can detect with the usual tools. It just isn't catching the CSS on the first go round.
And yes, I could probably go to the FF support forums (searches yield no similar problems), I'm just keeping it in the family for the first try here.
Best answer: This happens for me on sites that use a separate host to serve their CSS stylesheets (e.g. metafilter.com uses mefi.us to serve stylesheets). In my case it's because my ISP supplies a crap ADSL modem with its own forwarding DNS server which chokes on address lookups about 30% of the time - lookups for the main site usually go fine, but the ancillary site never resolves, eventually times out, and the browser renders the site without styles.
(You wouldn't happen to be using a 2Wire ADSL modem, would you? Some models are notorious for it…)
If you set the network connection in Windows to use an external DNS server (e.g. Google's), does the problem go away?
Other potential causes: over-zealous AdBlock filters blocking connections (at least one site I can't recall used to serve CSS from "ad.sitename.com" which was blocked by a custom filter I had), a bad netmask stopping connections (yes, I once mistakenly set up my netmask as 192.168.1.0 - took me days to figure out why most sites worked but some didn't ;-), broken routing by your ISP or upstream provider (there's been a bit of that going on between Aus & Eur the last few days), low DNS timeout values in your OS (Firefox used to have it's own internal timeout value, IIRC, but I can't find anything on it in recent versions), etc.
posted by Pinback at 11:08 PM on December 10, 2010
(You wouldn't happen to be using a 2Wire ADSL modem, would you? Some models are notorious for it…)
If you set the network connection in Windows to use an external DNS server (e.g. Google's), does the problem go away?
Other potential causes: over-zealous AdBlock filters blocking connections (at least one site I can't recall used to serve CSS from "ad.sitename.com" which was blocked by a custom filter I had), a bad netmask stopping connections (yes, I once mistakenly set up my netmask as 192.168.1.0 - took me days to figure out why most sites worked but some didn't ;-), broken routing by your ISP or upstream provider (there's been a bit of that going on between Aus & Eur the last few days), low DNS timeout values in your OS (Firefox used to have it's own internal timeout value, IIRC, but I can't find anything on it in recent versions), etc.
posted by Pinback at 11:08 PM on December 10, 2010
(In light of this: Let's just say I've been having one of those weeks. Feel free to remove the superfluous apostrophes above and save them for your own later use;-)
posted by Pinback at 11:14 PM on December 10, 2010
posted by Pinback at 11:14 PM on December 10, 2010
Response by poster: Been using the same modem and router for a good couple months now, it's a recent thing. I'm going to try using Google's DNS. The problem is ridiculously sporadic, though, so it's never clear whether anything I've done has affected it. I'm leaning towards DNS problems at Comcast at this point, though, and perhaps some kind of timing or request difference between FF and Chrome that makes the latter more reliable. Thanks for the suggestions.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:28 PM on December 10, 2010
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:28 PM on December 10, 2010
i have the same problem and i have no idea what's causing it, but for what it's worth, my ISP is also comcast.
posted by woodvine at 12:37 AM on December 11, 2010
posted by woodvine at 12:37 AM on December 11, 2010
I've been getting the same problem this week, just now with IMDB, and I had a restart pending for the newest Firefox. I restarted just now and the problem continues. One piece of data here is that I went to look at the source and clicked on the first CSS include I found. "The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression." Something hinky is going on. I thought it was because I installed noscript this week, but it's still broken even if I allow all scripts to execute.
posted by rhizome at 12:41 AM on December 11, 2010
posted by rhizome at 12:41 AM on December 11, 2010
This has been happening to me in Firefox recently as well. It hasn't happened in Safari, but maybe I haven't browsed in Safari enough.
posted by mnemonic at 11:27 AM on December 11, 2010
posted by mnemonic at 11:27 AM on December 11, 2010
Response by poster: Changing my DNS settings to Google's (8.8.8.8 primary and 8.8.4.4 secondary) seems to have solved the problem, or at least it has been dormant since I made those changes. I'll update this if it recurs. Thanks, Pinback!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 7:02 PM on December 11, 2010
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 7:02 PM on December 11, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:57 PM on December 10, 2010 [1 favorite]