Hi Peter 1. Good to hear you have no problems loading the downloadhelper dot net page. It must be the black storm cloud over that follows me around. Tested again today. FireFox doesn't time out while searching for the site - after about 6 minutes it suddenly displayed a partially loaded page. Other websites appear to load normally within a second or so - e.g. ABC News, Bureau of Meteorology,TUAW, Apple, Comsec. None of these had any caching history in FireFox.
2. I used to have FireFox 3.6 but was forced to "upgrade". And iViewFox stopped working. Only used FF for emergencies since. The FF add-on Firebug was recommended to me for the "split screen" feature while editing in WordPress, hence my renewed luke-warm interest in other FF add-ons. 3. I have a feeling my iMac is not 100 percent fit and can't cope with Mountain Lion. Perhaps it has reached its planned obsolescence use-by date. It shows other strange behaviour from time to time (see other WAMUG threads!) Latest peculiarity was an unusable eyeTV recording of an ABC 21 program yesterday. 4. Not worth pursuing the downloadhelper dot net loading issue; I'll just write it off as another peculiar thing. Probably write off Firefox too. Cheers Alan On 03/10/2012, at 7:53 AM, Peter Hinchliffe <hinch...@multiline.com.au> wrote: On 02/10/2012, at 11:45 PM, Alan Smith <sma...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > Hello WAMUG > > I cannot open the website www.downloadhelper.net using FireFox on my iMac. > It seems to search continually but doesn't load. Any rational explanation? > > I have no problem loading that site with Safari on the iMac or iPad where the > page opens within a second or so. DownloadHelper is a FireFox add-on so I > would expect to be able to reach the website. I do not have the DH add-on > installed, but may do so at a later date. > > Problem appeared yesterday (first time I ever looked for this site) but I > assumed it was a temporary outage. The problem persisted today. I did a > clean install of FireFox (ver 15.0.1) after uninstalling the auto-updated > version (app and 3 library files) with AppCleaner. > > I made no changes to the default preference settings. I disabled three > FireFox plug-ins installed by default: Google Earth 6.1, iPhoto Photocast > 7.0, and Java Applet 14.4.0. I installed one FireFox add-on, Firebug 1.10.3. > > I understand that websites can identify the calling browser type as well as > other data. Perhaps I've been blacklisted because I normally use Safari! > > Regards, Alan > > Alan Smith > Late 2009 iMac 21.5" Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz 12G RAM - OSX 10.8.2 > iPad2; ATV2 > No problems here. I haven't updated Firefox in a while, so I started with 7.0, which automatically updated to 12.0, and is now 15.0.1. The downloadhelper page loaded perfectly with each update. The downside is that the few FF plugins I had installed are all now incompatible with 15.0.1, and no suitable replacements can be found. Fortunately I rarely use FireFox so this not a big problem, but if this is any indication of what an "update" does then I will be using it even less. Since, like you, Safari is my default browser, I doubt if any form of blacklisting has been used (a practice which on the face of it would seem to be extremely self-defeating!). Do you have any problems with other sites using Firefox? I do know that Firefox's behaviour has changed significantly since their new aggressive updating policy came into play, and certain websites which used to load properly in earlier versions of Firefox where Safari would fail are now almost unusable in Firefox. Peter Hinchliffe Apwin Computer Services FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer Perth, Western Australia Phone (618) 9332 6482 Mob 0403 046 948 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Mac because I prefer it -- Windows because I have to. -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug> -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>