Google Image Search displays only one page of results, then grey boxes
Since many months ago, google image search has been showing grey boxes instead of thumbnails after a random number of correctly shown thumbnails.
I've seen several posts on the web and several suggestions, but none solved the problem for me (FF 20.0.1, Windows Vista and Windows 7).
I finally tracked down the source of the problem, and found a workaround:
Looking at my firewall (iptables nat) traffic I found this while loading a image search result: 192.168.168.159 -> 74.125.234.226 TLSv1 Alert (Level: Fatal, Description: Unexpected Message)
So I realized that since a while ago firefox has been using https everytime we use google.
The workaround is, after loading the image search result (with the gray boxes), just replace the https for http in the browser address bar. That loads the remaining images without problems as you scroll down the page.
IE does not present the issue because it doesn't do this redirection. If you load a "good" search result in IE, then replace http for https in the address bar, the same problem happens in IE.
(so, excuse me for posting this here, as it is not really a "firefox" issue, but since most pple are complaining that it is, I though this would be a good place for the information to be found)
Réiteach roghnaithe
Thanks, but as I mentioned, IE does the same thing if forced to https. I can boot to linux, and FF does the same there, as does Chromium.
So it is not anything related to FF cache, cookies, or plugins, or even FF. It is likely something in the firewall. I just posted it here because other people have been blaming FF for this problem (it is more prone to be seen in FF because it has been redirecting google to https since 14.0.1).
br,
Joao S Veiga
Read this answer in context 👍 1All Replies (5)
Clear the cache and the cookies from sites that cause problems.
"Clear the Cache":
- Firefox/Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Cached Web Content: "Clear Now"
"Remove Cookies" from sites causing problems:
- Firefox/Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies: "Show Cookies"
Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance).
- Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe Mode start window or otherwise make changes.
Réiteach Roghnaithe
Thanks, but as I mentioned, IE does the same thing if forced to https. I can boot to linux, and FF does the same there, as does Chromium.
So it is not anything related to FF cache, cookies, or plugins, or even FF. It is likely something in the firewall. I just posted it here because other people have been blaming FF for this problem (it is more prone to be seen in FF because it has been redirecting google to https since 14.0.1).
br,
Joao S Veiga
Try to set the network.http.spdy prefs to false on the about:config page to disable SPDY.
- network.http.spdy.enabled
- network.http.spdy.enabled.v2
- network.http.spdy.enabled.v3
Thanks, but again, the issue is external to FF.
In my case it turned out that the corporate firewall was blocking port 443 to gmail.com (no personal email access inside the firewall; gmail.com:80 was taken care of by the transparent proxy filter), but it so happens that gmail.com may sometimes resolve to IPs which are also resolved for encrypted-tbnX.gstatic.com, from where the Nth+ image thumbnails in the google image search result page are served. So I was actually blocking some of the encrypted-tbnX.gstatic.com urls when accessed with https at the firewall, and the google images result page showed gray boxes in their places.
I switched then to block gmail.com (and other hostnames used by the gmail login process) by DNS "poisoning", and the gray boxes are gone.
Of course, this is very specific to my case, but other users getting the gray boxes after FF 14.0.1 (when it apparently started redirecting google to https) might try https with google from other browsers before starting to tinker with FF settings and addons. If other browsers also show the gray boxes, then tinkering with FF is useless (other than the methods which bypass the 14.0.1 https redirection).
In this case, right-click at one gray box and select "View Image" to try to open it on another window or tab. That will show the actual error preventing the thumbnail to load, and the address bar will show the actual thumbnail url. Then investigating why your computer (not only FF) can't access that url will reveal the cause.
br,
Joao S Veiga
For me the issue was cookies (happened with Google and numerous other sites), I had to install Cookie Monster, and explicitly allow session cookes from google.co.uk. I'm not sure if there is a non-add-on way of doing this i nFirefox, but after this it all works OK.