Firefox and IE can't connect to the internet, but ping works

Question

I was over at a friend's house and her roommate complained of computer troubles. A standard Dell laptop running Vista. When plugged into the internet (no router) both IE and Firefox would refuse to work. However, a simple

ping www.google.com

worked flawlessly. Any ideas?

Answer 1

First thing to check is the proxy configuration of both web browsers. In IE this can be found under "Tools", "Options", "Connections" and "LAN Settings". If anything is ticked in there, try removing it (or double check the settings are correct for your internet connection).

Answer 2

Third step after successful pinging a machine and having already checked the proxy settings of the browser (don't forget to check how they are set at the machine where it does work) would be to actually trying to connect on the correct port with telnet. You don't need to understand the protocol, usually it's enough to see whether a connection can be established or not.

From the command line, type

telnet www.google.com 80

Where 'www.google.com' is the name of the site you want to connect to and '80' is the port - I assume you're trying to access the web interface, so that would be 80. Expect one of:

Connecting to www.google.com...Could not open connection to the host, on port 80: Connect failed

Means the connection couldn't be made by any reasons: the port might be closed, a firewall might be blocking the request, the host name might not be found, or the remote machine not be reachable. Yeah, rather unspecific, that's why you try the ping first.

If the screen blanks (WinXP telnet.exe does this, Linux does not) and it seems like you can enter something (cursor moves), the connection seems to be fine. Don't worry if you don't see your cursor anymore, don't see what you type or some garbagge is printed - just close the window.

If the connection doesn't work, look for personal firewalls.

Answer 3

In this case it's almost always the firewall that's blocking them. It most often happens after a security update that the firewall automatically blocks them or the user gets notified and blocks them.

Check the list of allowed/blocked programs in your software firewall and make sure that both ie and firefox are allowed.

Answer 4

I have quite often seen this because the ISP have blocked webtraffic due to suspicious activity. Usually from malware/viruses on the users computer.

Answer 5

Firewall, antivirus, proxy settings, temporary internet files, etc, all can cause this kind of problem.

The quickest and easiest thing to do is reset Internet Explorer's settings.

Answer 6

What worked for me in this case was running System File Checker

sfc /scannow

Answer 7

What worked for me after 2 days of war with my pc was do uninstall the zonealarm. even though i didn't see it running in the processes (in the windows tasks manager) is blocked my browsers from seeing web pages, while ping www.google.com worked well.