MetaChat - Why do I keep getting sent to the Google homepage?

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16 June 2009

Why do I keep getting sent to the Google homepage? Ikkyu2 is a saint, and he just installed a new hard drive for me after mine crashed rather spectacularly. Everything seems to be working fine, except that about one out of four times, Firefox is giving me either 404 error pages or routing me to the Google homepage rather than to the URL I typed in. Why, and how to fix? →[More:]

* The URLs I'm typing are correct; some are even autofilled bookmarked pages. Metachat is among them; the navigation bar says "http://www.metachat.org", the title bar will say "MetaChat," the little bunny icon even appears, but the page loaded is the Google homepage.

* I have tried flushing the Windows DNS cache and disabling the FireFox DNS cache. I thought it helped, but then it stopped helping.

* Shift-refresh sometimes makes the page load correctly after it has loaded incorrectly.

* I have privoxy running, if that makes any difference.

post by: occhiblu at: 19:02 | 10 comments

Does it do it in IE too?
If not, and if it were me, I'd uninstall and reinstall ff.

posted by DarkForest 16 June | 19:47

I'd also check to see if it still does it with privoxy disabled...

posted by DarkForest 16 June | 19:49

Disabling Privoxy doesn't seem to help.

IE isn't currently doing it, but it's kind of a hit-or-miss problem, so it's hard to say for certain.

posted by occhiblu 16 June | 20:48

I'm in the midst of reinstalling Firefox. We'll see how that goes.

Weirdly, not only was I getting the Google homepage, but I was channeling the future Google homepage. It was shunting me to the Igor Stravinsky birthday Google page, even though it was not yet June 17th, Stravinsky's birthday.

Spooooooooooooky.

posted by occhiblu 17 June | 00:18

OK, reinstalling Firefox did not fix it. I am still getting Igor Stavinski psychic Google homepages.

Anyone have other ideas?

posted by occhiblu 17 June | 00:23

This is weird.

This sure sounds like some kind of networking connectivity issue. I'd uninstall privoxy for now. (Not disable - uninstall) Also - you should do a repair on your network connection.

What happens when you try and load web pages from an IP address?
e.g. http://207.210.244.44/ should show "It Works!"

The weird google homepage makes me think that your location settings are set up wrong. Make sure that your location & language are correct.

If you go to http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/, where does it say your IP is located?

posted by seanyboy 17 June | 01:27

If it is just a firefox problem, you should delete all your firefox user profile.
Stop firefox, and delete the folder shown here.

posted by seanyboy 17 June | 01:30

I just uninstalled Privoxy, so we'll see if that helps.

I tried the IP address you listed above and it does say "It works!" But again, this problem happens sporadically, so it's hard to say if that's a definite.

The IP Tracer is showing my correct location.

I'll try deleting the user profile next.

posted by occhiblu 17 June | 10:48

Getting rid of Privoxy seems to have solved the problem.

Unless the problem is just that my computer is haunted by Stravinsky and he's currently asleep or something.

posted by occhiblu 17 June | 10:59

Since I uninstalled Privoxy, it hasn't happened again, so that's 24 hours of working internet connectivity.

Thank you, seanyboy and DarkForest, for your help!

posted by occhiblu 18 June | 09:03

← Without going into details: I'm just, really, really tired of human beings right now || Something I learned (or rather had reiterated to me) today. →

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