Can anybody help me here? I changed nothing since last night, but now I can only access the internet through my arch-nemesis, AOL, which unfortunately works just fine. The Firefox error message I’m getting is “Unable to Connect”, IE says “This page cannot be displayed”.
At first I thought Firefox/IE just didn’t work at all anymore, but after playing around for awhile, I found out Firefox CAN connect to encrypted sites, like Blackboard or my school’s email server. Internet Explorer, as far as I know, can’t connect to any site. I tried messing with the security options, but nothing that looked relevant worked when I changed it, and in any case everything worked fine last night and I didn’t change any options before this started happening.
I have Windows XP home, Firefox 2.0, IE 6.0.
If anybody’s wondering, the only reason I have AOL is because it came free for 3 months with my laptop. I was happy connecting with AOL and then just opening up Firefox for actual internet usage.
Thanks in advance for any and all replies and help.
Are you navigating by bookmarks, or by typing in the URL? If you are typing the URL, then you may have “https” instead of “http” at the beginning of the URL from the last time you visited an encrypted site. In other words, if you are trying to go to https://www.google.com it won’t work
I have a Microsoft firewall and Norton internet security. Even with both turned off, the problem persists.
Thanks for the responses so far, guys. I usually can plod through any computer problems on my own by simply running through the list of what has recently changed, but I’m at a loss because as far as I know, nothing is different. Worked last night, turned it off, turned it on this morning and now there are problems. You can imagine the frustration. It isn’t so bad since I still have the internet and yahoo messenger works fine, I’d just like to use my preferred browser instead of the abomination that is AOL.
Any suggestions, comments or hunches you have give me insights into what may or may not be the problem, and make me feel like I’m doing something productive. So thanks all the way.
This may be too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention it anyway:
I occasionally have a similar problem and the only cure was to reboot. So, give that a try.
Do you have a proxy set up. If the port 80 proxy was down, then you may not get any http traffic to work. https does not use the proxy, so it goes through.
Of course, your ISP may be using a transparent proxy that has failed.
Alternatively, your ISP may have set up filtering that requires a proxy. AOL may use this, and FF/IE may not be set up to use it.
There’s no proxy that I know of. But, I’m ashamed to say, Manduck nailed it. Shut down the machine last night, turned it on this morning and everything is A-Okay.
I feel kind of stupid for not trying that, because I used to do it all the time; but now it takes too long to dial up to the internet every time so that I’ve taken to leaving the thing on all day. I still don’t know what the problem actually was, and now I’m curious as to why computers develop random issues that can be solved by just rebooting? Was a flip-flop in the wrong state or something? Or is Bill Gates to blame?
Anyway, thanks for all the help, folks, I appreciate it.
It’s unlikely that it was a hardware malfunction. My WAG is that the AOL browser did something that prevented IE and Firefox from talking to HTTP sites.
I don’t know - I used to have a problem sometimes when I visited canoe.ca with the Opera browser. If I scrolled down before the page had finished loading, my computer lost the ability to load web pages. Even other browsers couldn’t load web pages, not just Opera. Email and everything else worked just fine, but http would be hosed. The only thing that worked was to reboot, which was why I suggested it.
I haven’t had that problem lately; it probably was a bug in that old version of Opera I guess.