This problem is annoying and not debilitating, but irksome nonetheless: on occasion I’ll try to navigate to a site, only to have Firefox tell me that “it cannot find the server”. :rolleyes: But if I keep hitting the “try again” button (upwards of half a dozen times), it eventually will load it 99% of the time. Is there some network or browser setting somewhere which will ensure that it will automatically “keep trying” to load the page without me having to manually hammer that annoying button?
Well, it could be that the site really is down but comes up during the time you are hitting Refresh. In that case you may be doing more harm than good by hammering the server as it tries to recover.
You could ping the site repeatedly; here is how to do it in Windows. (See Tips & Warnings for how to continually ping a website.)
There may be a bug in Firefox affecting its loading of certain pages. You could try keeping an eye on the type of page you are trying to access and see if there is a pattern. Here is Mozilla’s Bugzilla which keeps track of bugs in Firefox.
Don’t think this is just with Firefox. I’ve got the same problem with IE8. Sometimes it hs trouble with only one site, other times it tells me that it is unable to find any site I may be trying to log onto. But if I keep trying it will finally say “Oh well, ok, here it is”.
I haven’t mentioned this on the SD before because I was sure that I’d be inundated with replies from IE haters to the effect that I really have to change to Oracle, or Firefox, or Mozilla, or Opera, or etc. and so forth ad finitum.
I had this very same problem just last week on a Vista machine. It turned out to be a buggy Atheros wireless driver that was making the computer switch from “Local and Internet” access to “Local Only” about every thirty seconds. Windows Update was useless in locating a functional driver, but it did exist. In my case I Googled for the symptoms along with the network card model and found that the dirty work had been done for me; it was a known problem. Give that a shot if you haven’t already.
If you are referring to trying to access the Straight Dope, I have been having that problem for about a week now. I always seem to be able to load the main page, but when trying to access the forums I continually receive “page can not be found”. If I keep hitting refresh the page will eventually load. Using Chrome and no other problems with other sites.
well if it’s your internet connection period then it would happen with all browsers and all web sites and all programs you would notice connection issues.
if it doesn’t happen with internet explorer at all then It is Firefox most likely I would reinstall or install Google Chrome
if you don’t want to leave Firefox you can try disabling certain addons or reinstall/repair even uninstall first that may fix it.