Firefox 101: What to Do If Sites Don’t Work

Fixing vague errors in software applications isn’t really the easiest thing to do, especially when no information is provided as to what may have caused the problem in the first place.

As far as browsers are concerned, for example, one of the most difficult to diagnose problems are “Server not found” and “Unable to connect,” both of which could show up for either just one website or for all of them.

If one of these two errors show up for just one website, the chances are that the page itself is the culprit, so there’s not much to do on your side.

But if you get the very same messages regardless of the website that you try to load, then the problem might be on your side. And this point, the struggle for a fix begins.

The first thing that you need to try is check the security software running on your computer.

Very often, firewalls and security suites come with rules that could prevent applications from connecting to the Internet, and this means that browsers might also be blocked as well. If this is the case, the easiest way to fix the whole thing is to either remove Firefox from the blacklist or just create an exception for the browser.

The second stop should be third-party extensions installed in Firefox.

Believe it or not, but a bad extension could cause all kinds of issues, from a broken-down browser that no longer loads any website to a full crash experienced just after firing up Firefox.

In this case, figuring out which extension is the one that needs to be removed is pretty difficult, but I’d start with the ones that you installed most recently. Remove the latest add-ons one by one and see if websites now work correctly.

In some cases, malware infections could also block websites.

And it’s all because certain malware is built in a way that restricts Internet access, basically making it impossible for the user to look for more information, downloaded cleaning software, and things like that which would eventually lead to the removal of the malware altogether.

So if you have an antivirus product on your device, run a full scan to make sure the drives are clean.

If you’ve made changes to your Internet connection, you better check Firefox connection settings too.

For example, if you’ve previously used a proxy and now your Internet connection no longer requires one, head over to this path to update your configuration:

Windows Updates could also break down browsers, so check the known issues section of the latest updates released by Microsoft.

If nothing works, I recommend you to start Firefox in Safe Mode to make sure that no add-on is at fault for your problems loading websites. In some cases, starting from scratch could also do the job, but only if the culprit is the browser itself and not a third-party app or a recent change to your Internet connection.

The easiest way to determine if this is a problem with Firefox exclusively, you can try to see if everything is working correctly in a different browser. If it does, there’s a good chance that malware isn’t an issue, as virus infections typically hit all applications trying to connect to the Internet.