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Got an unusual problem: I have a new lubuntu machine that can only visit certain websites with firefox 34. Can't visit google.com/ncr, can't visit jetbrains.com (I want to get a couple of IDEs), can't visit mozilla.org (the irony). Can visit bing.com, can visit nytimes.com.

The odd thing is that a windows laptop can visit all these sites without problem. Another lubuntu box with an almost identical install connected to the same network cable can also visit these sites. Chromium (installed from the deb package) has no navigation problems, so clearly this is a firefox problem. Using chromium, I downloaded the bz2 file for firefox 34.0.5 from the mozilla site in case it was just canonical's package that had a problem, but I experience all the same problems with this version too.

Some output:

$> uname
Linux my_nodename 3.13.0-43-generic #72-ubuntu SMP the_date x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$> firefox -v
Mozilla Firefox 34.0

Limitations for debugging suggestions:

I'm in a network that requires http/https/ftp go through a squid proxy (I have no admin/access rights to this proxy). ping is blocked on this network. traceroute is too slow to give anything but asterixes outside the internal network for any website.

Edit: uninstalling stock firefox 34 and then installing ff 34.0.5 directly from mozilla.org doesn't work.

Starting firefox in ./firefox -safe-mode doesn't help either.

I have also noted that google.com doesn't even return a response to the GET request, but interestingly blogger.com does and I can view the complete page source, it just doesn't render. (Unfortunately, because google.com doesn't return anything it can't be Gecko).

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    What happens when you try going to those sites? Have you tried starting Firefox in safe mode to see if any add-ins are blocking those sites?
    – fixer1234
    Dec 22, 2014 at 8:53
  • The only addon loaded was Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 2.9. Starting firefox -safe-mode disables this, but it doesn't help. If I open the network debugger console on mozilla.org in safe mode, it eventually displays "unable to connect" and the initial GET method never returns. If I do the same thing on bing.com, it returns http 200s for all the constituent files.
    – Escher
    Dec 22, 2014 at 9:06
  • If you run Firefox in normal mode you get an "unable to connect" message in Firefox for those sites?
    – fixer1234
    Dec 22, 2014 at 9:26
  • Yes, "unable to connect" for normal mode too on those sites.
    – Escher
    Dec 22, 2014 at 9:56

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It was the proxy settings.

Apparently somehow Firefox on this machine didn't understand how to use the system proxy settings ... but the symptoms were pretty weird. The router definitely blocks all http traffic on port 80 that doesn't pass through that server. So apparently for some sites firefox was correctly interpreting the system proxy config files, but not for other sites.

I've manually set the proxy configuration in Firefox now and all traffic is correctly routed, received, and rendered.

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