What happened to my Firefox?

Factual Questions
1

I have been using Firefox 43.0.1 on WinXP for awhile. As of yesterday, the following sites do not work:

  1. One site I use regularly now has a giant user logo that fills the entire page, and all formatting has been lost. It used to be a nice list of files in neat groups, now every file on the page (hundreds of them) just line up down the left edge. The little face profile that was my avatar is now 1200 pixels square. It doesn’t matter if I sign in or not:
  1. No URL with wikipedia in it works, I just get errors.

"An error occurred during a connection to www.wikipedia.org. The OCSP response contains out-of-date information. (Error code: sec_error_ocsp_old_response)

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified."
3. No URL with mozilla.org in it works, same error.

I did a refresh, nothing changed except that I no longer have Adblockplus, and I cannot get it back since it is a mozilla page.

What is going on?

Dennis

2

Did you run a virus/anti-malware scan?

3

Yes, I used Malwarebytes.

Dennis

4

Are you running XP SP3? SP3 made some important updates to outdated handling of security certificates that fixed a number of security certificate authentication problems. This could well account for problems #2 and 3. Your links work fine for me with Firefox under XP SP3.

5

I’m not sure what version of WinXP I have as it was installed on the machine when I bought it used a few years ago. But I have used that link or sublinks within it literally thousands of times before yesterday.

OK, I checked the version, I have a registered copy of WinXP service pack 3.

Dennis

6

The current version of Firefox is 50.1.0.
The last version of Firefox 43 was 43.0.4

Is there some reason you must stay on Firefox 43?
My first guess would be that you need to update to the latest version.

7

Or change to a safer variant such as Pale Moon or Cyberfox. I adored and proclaimed the glory that was Firefox for 10 years, but I can no longer defend it, let alone use it.

8

I tried that first linked site. Got the same formatting issue as you did, but it went away when I disabled adblocking on it.

Try disabling your adblock for that site.

9

I got it!

I searched for that specific error code and the main reason is if your computer’s clock is incorrect and does not match the web site’s certificate. I checked my clock and it was set ahead to February somehow.

Everything seems to work OK, now.

Actually I first noticed this when I went to see if Firefox 47 (that’s what is recommended when I look for updates, not v50) was OK for WinXP. I’ll go ahead and update.

Dennis

10

Aw. I was gonna tell you to check your computer’s clock.

Still, I’ll post to recommend you update Firefox. If you don’t like upgrading very often, you can try the Extended Support Release, which only does small security patches. For XP, you’ll need the 32-bit Windows version.

If you don’t mind keeping up with updates (they aren’t that big if you keep up with them), then I suggest save yourself some time (and bandwidth) and just go download the latest Firefox, rather than slowly upgrading through different versions. Don’t worry–none of your data will be lost.