Firefox Doesn't Play Nice With Some Sites

Does anyone find that there are certain sites that just don’t work with Firefox? There are some sites that I can access just fine with Chrome or Safari. But in Firefox, they just don’t work. Certain aspects or certain pages of the site just don’t load properly. Anyone else fine this to be the case?

It isn’t all that many sites, but one of the big ones is USPS tracking page. I can get to the USPS page and can click on tracking, no problem. Then I enter the tracking number, click track, and it instantly loads…a blank page. There’s another site where I sometimes buy supplies for work and I cannot use it. Again, the main page of the site loads fine, but when I click on any specific category, I get just the top header and the rest of the page is almost like a generic placeholder for stuff that hasn’t loaded in yet, but it’s “finished” loading. There’s at least one more site that I can’t think of at the moment.

This problem has persisted for many months, through the initial release of Fedora 39 through to the latest update and latest kernel, as well as many updates of Firefox. So it doesn’t seem like a simple bug. It seems like a more fundamental incompatibility between Firefox and these sites.

Anyone else have issues like that with Firefox? Is there something I’m missing that would allow me to access full functionality on these sites?

Just tried the USPS site and tracking works for me (I typically use the rather nice Android app BTW). Firefox 125 on Fedora 39.

The pattern you’re describing smells a bit like a fragmentation/path MTU issue.

One of various pages with instructions how to test for the problem

Cloudflare’s backgrounder

I use flatpak firefox in ubuntu. I’ve occasionally experienced some problems with some sites.

From my experience almost every of those problems were due to my Firefox privacy settings and those web sites using third-party cookies in a wrong way.

At least one other time the issue was a purely artificial limitation and could be solved by faking the browers user agent.

I don’t recall of any other case when Firefox won’t just work. But as the web becomes a mono-culture of Blink engine based browsers I won’t be surprised if such case were to pop up.

Interesting. I just tried a “private” window and the USPS Tracking page worked, but the other site still didn’t work.

Yeah, Canvas (school site) doesn’t like loading external resources like my textbook so I keep Opera on my computer for occasions such as this where some developers just pretend only Chrome exists.

1 Like

I occasionally have problems with some sites on Firefox but I don’t think it’s the same as yours. I suspect my problem is related to dark reader extension. Occasionally I find a site that displays as a bright white background with light gray text that is almost impossible to read without highlighting the text first.