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About 2 weeks ago, my Firefox running on Windows 10 PC is behaving strangely. GMail got disconnected from time to time.

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Reload does not fix it. It just stucks in this page forever.

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The strange thing is that it ONLY affects Google. For example, when it happens, typing "google.com" does not load. Clicking a link in an existing Google search result does not do anything. But all other websites behaves normally. I have to change my default search engine in FireFox from Google to something else.

Typing www.google.com in address bar

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The response page to the request is empty (no response). Shift-Reload does not fix it.

I am really curious how it ended up like this. It only affects FireFox. Edge and Chrome works fine. I made sure my FireFox is up-to-date. The problem eventually goes away after 10 min or so. How do I figure out the root cause?

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    Have you tried backing up your current Firefox user profile and creating a new Firefox user profile to see if the problem is perhaps one of your extensions? Are you using a proxy? Whenever I had this problem at work with Google Mail, it was the proxy, it was always the proxy.
    – Ramhound
    Jun 25, 2021 at 16:18

1 Answer 1

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+100

There are many reports of this error. Below are some workarounds, at least until Firefox developers fix this bug. Restart Firefox after applying each one. These are not a persistent and the bug can return.

  1. Firefox Bug 1510386 defines the cause as switching between Firefox Nightly/Beta and Release Firefox. The solution is to unregister the service worker for Gmail:

    • Go to about:serviceworkers
    • Find the entry for Gmail
    • Click unregister
    • Refresh Gmail.
  2. Another solution is to reload the page without cache by Shift+Reload or Control+F5.

  3. Clear cache and cookies in menu Settings > Privacy & Security, under "Cookies and Site Data" click "Clear Data…" while selecting all options.

  4. Delete the storage folder for Gmail. Mine is found in folder
    C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\2lrpqlkx.default-1624267825608\storage\default\https+++mail.google.com
    (the identifiers may be different for you).

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    At first it looks very similar. But the bug you linked is 3 years old. Any bug would have been fixed by now. Also, Shift-Reload does not work for me.
    – some user
    Jun 25, 2021 at 17:59
  • This 3 year old bug is still marked as "Status: NEW", so it hasn't been fixed yet. I have already encountered unfixed Firefox bugs from more than 10 years ago... I suggest trying these workarounds. If they don't work, it might be worthwhile to open a bug-report of your own.
    – harrymc
    Jun 25, 2021 at 18:10
  • You might be right. I have used gmail in incognito mode for 3 days and the issue is not happening. I have previously cleared all google cookies to no avail. So the issue might be related to cache. But I think this might also happen to be a Google bug.
    – some user
    Jun 28, 2021 at 16:46
  • If this is not happening in incognito mode, the problem might be caused by some add-on. Try to disable all add-ons to see if this also avoids the problem.
    – harrymc
    Jul 16, 2021 at 10:43
  • Tried disabling. No differences. Also, my only add-on, uBlock Origin, is configured to run even in incognito mode.
    – some user
    Jul 22, 2021 at 17:11

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