Firefox won't load home page on startup when it's GMail

Well here's a possible solution based on my recent Cyberfox v36 experiences. Might be worth a try.

Steps taken so far:

Clean installed Cyberfox v36 and the problems returned. Dropped connections and pages not loading at random - anytime including new tabs.

Experimented with enabling and disabling certain add ons with mixed success. It was confusing because one minute the problem appeared to be fixed only to return again.

If anyone is interested there's a reasonably decent add on here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ences-monitor/

It monitors changes to about:config preferences but also includes eCleaner that allows you to manually check for and remove traces of old add-ons that might not have been fully removed if you uninstalled them.

I used that to remove a couple of leftovers but it still didn't solve the issue.

Here's what worked for me:

I'm a long time user of Norton DNS as it blocks connection to known malicious sites. That's not the only method I use but it's part of my security layer. I decided to change to Google DNS just to see what happened and suddenly everything worked perfectly.

Note: Changing DNS requires restarting your network connection to take effect.

My usual choices and current setup are shown here:



So you might want to try changing DNS lookup to something other than the one you're using. In addition you might want to try running the command ipconfig /flushdns before switching.

I'm back to my about:config defaults, and I switched my DNS to google, 8.8.8.8 (4).

So far I've only had one "new tab" when I opened FF since I changed it a week ago. I've also noticed google's DNS is more reliable and quicker than Verizon's DNS choices.

With all that's going on with Vz (TWC) I'm looking into changing to my only other choice, Xfinity, it'd be hard to cut the cord with the dear wife around and go with netflix, hulu, et al.

Vz and other big boys think they own ya. they put the fear of God in ya with termination fees but so what? Sometimes ya gotta take a stand!

TIM, how has your issue been doing?

I'm up to FF-v37.0.2 with dns set to google 8888-8844 and I only had the random blank page twice this past month so it seems the developers at FF may be listening. I still get the random freezes but they're not as bad either. In looking for a freeze issue related to a different thread here at 7F I found that this/our issue started around 2012 and FF v3.6.25, but I don't remember it this bad, so I'm trying a new angle with the freeze issue.

I've only started with the first from here: Firefox Freezes, Crashes, Hangs in Windows 7 / 8 I cleared cache, history and D/L history, when I went to reset the browser.download.lastDir preference in about:config I had a mild shock, it was set to an obscure sub-folder in my pictures library, I have no idea how FF picked that one?!? Nonetheless I reset it. I'm going to wait for a few days to see how FF reacts and if need be I'll work down the list.

   Information

I only used download.lastDir in the config search. When I reset it the status went to default, the type to string and the value was blank, when I went back to double check it, it was gone . I'm thinking it won't show until it's needed or the newer versions of FF don't need it. I do have my D/L's set to go to my desktop, and that's where they have always gone even before the reset.

There is another angle that I may check into that thewindowsclub doesn't touch on and that is that FF has a problem with auto-fill and the .www prefix where (as I read it) if you have identical bookmarks but one has the www and the other does not FF churns away until it, FF resolves the issue of which one it wants to use.

I saw that here: Force Firefox Autofill to Behave By Removing "WWW" Bookmarks

This is from a link on that LH page: Problems to Solve » Make Firefox

Steve

About the same for me then. The last time it completely froze was back in the 34 to 35versions. I didn't have the mouse, keyboard, nothing until FF sorted things out and revived itself. Now like yours it will stall but at least I have the mouse and keyboard.

I'll try and keep updating my end, I'm near the end of my cold that I've been fighting for the last three weeks I believe I've only been on-line for a couple of hours in that time.