About one week ago, Windows 10 did an automatic update. I use Bing as my homepage/browser and since that update Bing has been misbehaving. More specifically, the “Images” portion of Bing has been misbehaving. If I select an image, the page loads and then constantly reloads about once per second without ever stabilizing.
I queried Bing about this problem and received a nothing reply thanking me for bringing the problem to their attention but nothing has changed since.
So I’m asking the resident wizards of the SDMB for their help. I don’t want to use IEExplorer or Edge; I love Bing and don’t want to give it up. I can live without the “Images” page but I don’t want to.
Okay, Bing is not a browser. Bing is a search engine. Ignorance fought. What the hell is causing the problem I described and what the hell can I do about it?
Is Windows 10 a browser? I use Windows 10 and Bing—I open Windows 10 when I start or restart the computer and then I start Bing. If Bing is a search engine then I suppose Window 10 is a browser.
Actually, Firefox does play a role in this debacle but I’m not sure just what that role is.
Windows 10 is the operating system that runs the computer. The browser is a specific application, like Microsoft Word. What do you click on to get to your Bing page? Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox?
If instead of using Bing you type in google.com and do an image search, do you get the same weird behavior you get when you search images using Bing?
To recap, Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox are all browsers, and, at least in theory, all should run the Bing search engine properly.
Bing is a Microsoft product, as are the Edge and Internet Explorer browsers, so it is possible Internet Explorer and Edge have been more thoroughly tested to run Bing correctly.
(The “quip” about “Bing” beating his wife and kids is a “joke” referring to the alleged behavior on behalf of Bing Crosby and should be ignored.)
Okay, Firefox is the browser, Bing is the homepage. The older I get the less I know which is another way of saying my memory is going down the tubes. The problem is what I described: If I select the “Images” link from Bing and if I select a specific image (cars, trucks, motorcycles, babes, porn stars, whatever) the image page loads and immediately begins cycling on and off at a rate of about one second.
I have searched for “Images” using Google; the problem as described is not observed when Google is the search engine. I haven’t tried any others.
Click on the Firefox menu button, which should be in the top right corner (below the X to close the browser). It is three dark lines stacked vertically.
From that menu choose “Add-Ons”
OR -
In the address bar of a new tab, type “about:addons” and hit enter.
Either one of the above options should bring up your Add-Ons Manager in Firefox.
Click the “Disable” button for every add-on that is enabled. If some of them are disabled already, don’t click the “Enabled” button.
Now open a new tab and try your Bing search. Did that help?
Bing Crosby’s reputation took a sudden fall after his death when one of his sons published a tell-all about what a rat-bastard he was around the house.
I’m old enough that when I see “Bing” I start to whistle “Swing on a Star.”
Is there a reason why you need to use Bing as your homepage?
I mean, what I’m doing here is technically threadshitting, which I don’t like to do, but maybe the solution to this problem is not to use Bing. Are there any specific features you need that don’t have Google equivalents? Or some other reason not to want to use Google?
I’m actually surprised that nobody has advised clearing cache and cookies. That seems to be the Mozilla’s recommendation to the same problem. Do you know what version of Firefox you’re using, LouisB?
LouisB - what you are seeing is not an issue with an image, it’s called a “movie”. Sometimes they contain sounds as well - a “talkie”. The image actually “reloads” much faster than your once per second estimate and, thereby, gives the illusion of motion. An entire industry of highly paid but otherwise useless people has sprung up around this phenomenon. Pretty cool, huh?
[sub]Just kidding, you’re (probably) not that old! And movie stars are (possibly) not otherwise useless. Maybe. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.[/sub]
All I can contribute, LouisB, is to point out that you probably should have opened your thread in General Questions, not IMHO. Because there you would have been protected from every out-of-work comedian posting here to try out their edgy new “technical issue” comic material rather than contributing useful suggestions. :rolleyes:
Back to your description of the issue, I can’t picture what “cycling on and off” means. Are you selecting the “Images” tab of the search result return? And what is it doing? Flipping back to the “Web” tab with titles and web page transcripts? Flickering back and forth to a blank page?
The usual “clear cache/delete cookies” advice seems like a good start, but I don’t see any obvious connection, simply I can’t imagine any behavior like what you described, let alone one that could be caused by something as trivial as stale cache or bad cookies.
ETA: Have you tried other browsers? You’re using Windows, so some variant of Explorer is guaranteed to be available for a comparison test. (Not advocating using that abortion of a web browser, but for comparison it would be a good test.)
I wonder if turning off Javascript and then attempting to replicate the problem might be informative. The clearing of cache/cookies is to eliminate the possibility that corrupt cookies are creating a problem with fully loading the page.
I’m not an expert, but much of initial troubleshooting involves eliminating possibilities.