Log-in on Medical Site with Firefox not working

June 20, 2017 6:31 PM

MacBook Pro Sierra 10.12.5 with Firefox 54. I have an account with a medical clinic and everything's done online. Used to work fine but starting in March, I got the "user id/password incorrect" message. Tried resetting the password and got response that user id is correct and password reset successfully.

But—log-in doesn't work. Finally got in touch with their IT today. They use Microsoft Firefox and they can log into my account. Pulled up my ancient Safari browser and it logs me in (but doesn't work very well). Why won't my Firefox log me in?

posted by MovableBookLady to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Have you cleared out any cookies related to that website? Clear out your cache too. That's the first step for me.
posted by Brockles at 6:41 PM on June 20, 2017

Do you run any plugins in Firefox? Some of them can interfere in funny ways.
posted by advicepig at 6:51 PM on June 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

Or adblockers? I've had issues on a couple sites recently where I couldn't log in because my adblocker was blocking some JavaScript necessary for login.
posted by jferg at 7:01 PM on June 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

Best answer: You can clear your site cookies (preferences -> Privacy -> show cookies) and check that Firefox has saved the new password (preferences -> Security -> Saved logins). It's probably not the cache.

Give that a try and if that doesn't work MeMail me. I work at Mozilla, and if we have a compatibility problem with that site I'd like to see how we can fix it.

(That said: don't MeMail me any information about you or the specific name of the clinic, though - we put a lot of work into making sure we can solve people's problems without compromising anyone's privacy, so I don't want to know. Just tell me whether or not it works, I'll have some followup suggestions.)
posted by mhoye at 7:01 PM on June 20, 2017 [5 favorites]

When that happens to me (medical industry web design is second worst only to federal government web design) I try one at a time: allow pop-up windows (some actually rely on that in 1997, er, I mean 2017), allow flash (for only that site, then turn it back off), disable ad blocker. One of those 3 makes it work a large majority of the time. I'm on a mac as well.
posted by ctmf at 7:58 PM on June 20, 2017

Check the date, time, and timezone of your Mac; you can set it to synchronize with an NTP server, which is a public server that serves up the correct time, usually based on an atomic clock somewhere.

It used to be possible to do some hacking of secure sites by changing the clock on your computer and using some stolen/copied session credentials that expired at a previous time, so in order to avoid hacks like that, your computer's time needs to match the server's time within a certain small timeframe (5 minutes, maybe) in order for it to agree to secure your web session.

I think it's probably not this thing, but these other dang mefites got all the good answers already. Good luck.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:55 PM on June 20, 2017

I wonder if it has something to do with Firefox no longer supporting many plugins (including Java, Silverlight, and Flash.) It's a long shot, but version 52 was pushed in March, and that was the first to not support plugins. The IT people you spoke to may be running an older version, either because of institutional rules or because they know about this issue.
posted by punchtothehead at 5:53 AM on June 21, 2017

Open up a private FireFox window and try it.
posted by gregr at 7:47 AM on June 21, 2017

Response by poster: Okay: cookies and cache at zero; ad blocker off; privacy badger disabled—still doesn't work. All logical suggestions but . . . nada. I tried the private FF window, too, but made no difference. I did notice that FF didn't have this password in the saved list.

I'm going to memail mhoye and see if they have more suggestions. It may be an FF version issue as punchtothehead suggestions. We'll see.

Thanks to all for the help so far.
posted by MovableBookLady at 1:23 PM on June 21, 2017

Response by poster: Well, at mhoye's suggestion, I wound up doing a refresh on Firefox which wiped out everything back to the defaults. And that fixed it. Why? Don't know. I have added something back in and the log-in still works, so who knows. All I have to do now is find my Last Pass site and re-add it to my toolbar so I can get around my sites. Oh yeah, and find that bit that allows me to put the tabs below the address bar, as dog intended (I've got it stashed somewhere, just have to find it).

Thanks all, and especially mhoye.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:21 AM on July 4, 2017

For the record, you can type "about:support" into the URL bar, and that will show you a bunch of the gritty details about what Firefox you're running, and what it thinks the world looks like. This is all stuff that's intended for people debugging weird hardware or addon issues, and definitely not intended for regular-user consumption, but up in the top right hand corner you'll see the "refresh" button.

As MovableBookLady's experience may have hinted, this is usually a last-resort option. Particularly for people who are heavily invested in customizing their Firefox experience so it's Just Right, and will have to put things back where they were - which is really unfortunate, because people like MovableBookLady are our favorite users! - but it does work really well when nothing else does, so there's that.

I'm sorry it took this long to get resolved; I was traveling for the last week. Thank you for sticking with us.
posted by mhoye at 11:20 AM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]