Why does Firefox not load my site?
I am a product manager at a popular and trusted national news site. Multiple users have written in to us saying that only our site does not load for them, saying "looks like you're offline" even when they're not. Why is this? It loads on ever other browser. We're thinking it might be caused by a browser extension, but have been unable to recreate the issue. Thoughts?
All Replies (7)
Please provide a public link (no password) that we can check out. No Personal Information Please !
These are some of the things we tell users could cause problems, so you could try turning them ON to see whether they have any drastic effect:
- Firefox's Content Blocking / Tracking Protection (What happened to Tracking Protection?)
- with the standard list
- with the strict list
- Popular content blocking extensions such as
- Adblock Plus
- uBlock Origin
- Privacy Badger
- Ghostery
- Disconnect
- Blur
- Flash plugin disabled on your site, if you use a plugin-based renderer (Why do I have to click to activate plugins?)
- Cookies and/or local (DOM) storage blocked
- Forced HTTPS if you have an HTTP site
Thanks for the reply! We thought it could be caused by an ad blocker. After trying toggling all these settings, we still couldn't recreate the issue. We'll tell users the above, but any other suggestions are welcome!
Is that offline message coming from the website or is this a local message that is caused by some script not being able to access the server?
Current Firefox releases (63+) have a more 'advanced' content blocking feature.
The offline message is coming from our site. Even when I downloaded the latest version of Firefox and a bunch of ad blockers, I still couldn't recreate this issue.
Do you know what can trigger this line message?
If the server relies on JavaScript sending some data locally via XHR and the server doesn't receive this data then it is likely that some content blocking extension is actively blocking some essential data. That is always the risk when users have such extensions installed and all extensions have their own blocking lists and rules. You would have to contact affected users and check what content blocking extensions they have.
Yup, I guess the assumption then as we figured was that it was a rogue browser extension. We just have to find out which one...