Firefox refuses to connect once internet connection is established, requires restart

I am a researcher (in the humanities, so only of medium computer literacy) and I depend on having lots of browser tabs open at the same time for my daily work.

Whenever I start Firefox without having a working internet connection first, it will reliably refuse to connect to the internet once the connection has been established. It works fine when I restart it, though. But that means having to restore the previous session from the browser history.

I know its not a dealbreaker, but its annoying nevertheless. Ideally it would do what it is doing in Windows or other flavors of Linux: it should just connect to the working network interface and allow me to reload the page without an error message. This used to work for me actually until maybe openSUSE 13.1. Currently I am running a fully patched Leap 42.2 with vanilla Firefox 51.0.1 (64-bit) from the repositories and Adblockplus.

Could someone give me a hint why Firefox does not pick up an internet connection that has been established after the start of the browser? Or is this intended behavior, for security reasons maybe?

Thank you.

Hi, sorry but I cannot confirm your findings; i.e. what you witness is not true in general and might depend on your HW, config or network structure.
I have been using openSUSE since maybe 11.2 with a 3G USB dongle switched off and on only when needed and never had problems with Firefox.
Just now tried to switch off WiFi, switch off USB internet (a router / 3G dongle), closing/reopening Firefox (51.0.1), then switching on the USB router/3g and Firefox connected again without a glitch.
What I see is that when the router is on but the 3G modem is off (the system can ping the router but no internet connection…) Firefox takes several seconds to launch, like it were waiting for some bytes from the internet.
But after a timeout expires (?) everything is normal.

Writing this from a fully up to date Leap 42.2 Gnome.
Ready to aid in testing if I can be of any help.

I can confirm I have the same issue in Leap 42.2

steps to reproduce:
1.boot laptop in an environment where you don’t have access to any wifi
2. connect to a new wifi
3. Start firefox an try to open any web page

You will get page not found

  1. Close firefox, start firefox again - and bang it works.

I’ve not gathered any useful logs so far.

Next time I’ll plan to do the same with konqueror and chrome and see if this is browser specific or system specific

yes, can also confirm this

for both Leap and Tumbleweed this happens but seems to depend on hardware

can also confirm this is only noticable on wifi connections

Does the same thing happen if you wait say 30 secs after the connection has been made ?

Several things are going on when a connection to the internet is made and they aren’t instantaneous. Linux is probably better than windows in this respect but going on lap top use at work on windows it took rather a long time to decide that the internet connection was present. It may have changed but on power up it would check that the internet was working, find it wasn’t and drop back to a mode were it looked to see if the internet was present periodically. It took some time to pick it up because of that. This sort of thing also probably explains the desktop that looks like it should work not working on windows.

Linux seems to take a more positive approach - it will be there but it’s probably still possible to try to use it before it’s actually set up.

John