> You are right on; I disable Java in firefox and now can open links in > google search.
As I said, I have disabled cookies and javascript for goolge.de (using cookiemonster an noscript). But as I sometimes use google maps, I allow javascript on google.com and then use google.com for maps - with cookies disalbed. And here I have the same issue as you have, I cannot open the links, but the strange thing is: it's not all the time, sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Who knows what google guys were doing. Maybe they left a screw driver in there or something :)
