Hi keithherrman, interesting issues!

1.People link twitter messages or other items on forum boards and they show up until page loads fully then they disappear.

When you embed from Twitter, what normally happens is there is a kind of basic text or low fidelity rendering at first, and then a script loads a more full-featured and heavily styled version. It sounds as though something is going wrong with that script, or it is being blocked.

Some things you might look into:

Double-check content blockers: Firefox's Content Blocking feature and extensions that counter ads and tracking may break websites that embed third party content (meaning, from a secondary server).

(A) Do you see a shield icon toward the left end of the address bar, near the lock icon? More info on managing the Tracking Protection feature in this article: Content Blocking.

(B) Extensions such as Adblock Plus, Blur, Disconnect, Ghostery, NoScript, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin or uMatrix should provide toolbar buttons to manage blocked content in a page. There may or may not be a number on the icon indicating the number of blocked items; you may need to click the button to see what's going on and test whether you need to make an exception for this site.

Cache and Cookies: When you have a problem with one particular site, a good "first thing to try" is clearing your Firefox cache and deleting your saved cookies for the site.

(1) Clear Firefox's Cache

See: How to clear the Firefox cache

If you have a large hard drive, this might take a few minutes.

(2) Remove the site's cookies (save any pending work first). While viewing a page on the site, click the lock icon at the left end of the address bar. After a moment, a "Clear Cookies and Site Data" button should appear at the bottom. Go ahead and click that.

In the dialog that opens, you will see one or more matches to the current address so you can remove the site's cookies individually without affecting other sites.

Then try reloading the page. Does that help?

Testing in Firefox's Safe Mode: In its Safe Mode, Firefox temporarily deactivates extensions, hardware acceleration, and some other advanced features to help you assess whether these are causing the problem.

If Firefox is not running: Hold down the Shift key when starting Firefox. (On Mac, hold down the option/alt key instead of the Shift key.)

If Firefox is running: You can restart Firefox in Safe Mode using either:

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled
• (menu bar) Help menu > Restart with Add-ons Disabled

and OK the restart.

Both scenarios: A small dialog should appear. Click "Start in Safe Mode" (not Refresh).

Any improvement?

2. downloads from some sites do not download. example... rfa files from revitcity.com

What happens when you try to download? For example:

• Nothing, no message
• Gibberish in a Firefox tab
• Download fails (yellow dot on the Downloads arrow on the toolbar)
• Something else

(I don't think I can test the downloads on that site without creating an account.)

So regarding issue #2. If I select to download, it goes to a download page and bottom left it says it's transferring data but the download saveas never pops up like it does on say internet explorer. The download page has a link that says that if a download does not begin in 15 seconds to click here. when I click there, the browser page goes to a bunch of black diamonds with white questionmarks.

keithherrman said

So regarding issue #2. If I select to download, it goes to a download page and bottom left it says it's transferring data but the download saveas never pops up like it does on say internet explorer. The download page has a link that says that if a download does not begin in 15 seconds to click here. when I click there, the browser page goes to a bunch of black diamonds with white questionmarks.

It's like The Matrix: you have to learn to read the black diamonds. ;-)

Firefox will do that if the server says the Content-Type is HTML or text, which are content types that Firefox will display in a tab. So if this just started recently, the site might have goofed in a server update. If it has always been like this, then the site might never have assigned a custom Content-Type to .rfa files.

Is it an option to right-click and Save Link As, or do you need to use a button to access the download?

If you can't use Save Link As, or it's not convenient, I created an add-on to work around this kind of configuration issue. You use it to override the content-type the server sent for the .rfa file and define a new behavior for them.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/content-type-fixer/

Here's how to set up the override:

(1) Turn on listening by clicking its button (Zzzz disappears and a yellow burst appears on the button)

(2) Start the download again, you can cancel out of the Open/Save dialog. In this case, since the Download dialog doesn't come up, I created a zero-byte file to get .rfa into the log: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/badct/empty.rfa

(3) Click the toolbar button and click Add/Edit Content Types

(4) A tab will appear with a table showing your download request. Click Add for the .rfa file and assign a content-type (the fictitious one usually is fine). Example screenshot attached.

The table will show that row is now obsolete. Ignore that.

You can close this tab.

(5) Try the download again and you should now be able to define a persistent behavior (check the box in the download dialog).

Does that work on yours?

You can disable the extension when you are not downloading .rfa files. Click the button and then click Stop Listening/Clear Log.