The first issue can happen when Firefox is set to use HTTPS Only and you've entered a shortcut version of the site address (like example.com instead of www.example.com). The site's server can redirect from the shortcut address to the full address, but that doesn't work with an HTTPS connection. Telling Firefox it's okay to use HTTP with the shortcut address then allows the site to redirect you to the full secure address. Does it look like that might be the situation you're seeing?

The second issue could have many causes. In case the address is incomplete or has changed, try using an entry from your history to go to the site (if you type some words from the site name in the address bar, history entries should be suggested), or a bookmark, or a search engine result.

First, thank you for responding so quickly.

Your explanation in re HTTP makes sense; apparently I'll just have to live with it.

On the other issue, sounds like I'll have to experiment. Again, it just seems nuts that on first try you get a message that site can't be found, then when you hit "try again" it can.

And I also found this support forum difficult to use, to get back to my original post and see what responses are there.

But again: thank you for reaching out and helping.

We have suspected in the past that when a reload works nearly instantly, that the connection was stopped by a security filter that has been checking in the background between the two tries. But... this is hard to assess.

For future reference regarding this site, in the upper right corner where you see your user picture ("B"), if you hover that, a navigation panel drops down. One of the links is "My Questions". Maybe there should be an activity feed that shows automatically?

Again, thanks. Yes -- I did the hover thing and no "My Answers" appears. (And Firefox says my browser is the most recent.)

But wait: I just hovered again, and this time the My Questions option appeared. Oh well.

Thank you for your trouble.