Web pages get stuck on 'Looking up...' and cycle through a lot of unrelated pages
Hello,
My Firefox browser (72.0, 64-bit, Win8.1) became slower at loading pages with the previous update, and I've noticed that it's caused by the same problem on each page to varying degrees. I'll click on a page to load it, then the black 'finding' dot on the tab will bobble about a bit, then it turns to the blue 'connecting' dot and keeps loading for minutes. At the bottom left the page will say 'Looking up...' and will start off with the right or at least a reasonable address, such as www.google.com etc, but then it will keep going and come up with a load of random pages that all seem connected with adverts, tracking or monitoring. For example, looking up 'www.ikea.com' took 4 minutes 23 seconds from entering it to it loading fully. In that time covered the following:
Looking up www.ikea.com Looking up fonts.googleapis.com Looking up www.googletagmanager.com Looking up www.facebook.com Read s.salecycle.com Looking up www.facebook.com Looking up (numbers and letters).cloudfront.net Looking up www.google-analytics.com TLS handshake with i.salecycle.com Sending i.salecycle.com Looking up www.google-analytics.com Waiting for www.google-analytics.com
I don't have this problem with anything else connected to the network - I tested the WiFi connection just now on my Xbox and got 35.73, 34.31 and 35.94mb/s, but trying to load broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk on Firefox took 16m 13s just to load the page, and it's not even got near to starting the test. In that time I tried to write down all the pages it listed as looking up, waiting for, reading or TLS handshake with..., and have 44 different addresses that it was cycling through (probably more as some were very rapid) including:
us.creative.com cdn.cabla.to ap.lijit.com fw.adsafeprotected.com secure.adnxs.com pc.moatads.com ws.sessioncam.com sync.tidaltv.com
Pages on my phone are loading normally within a second or two. Unfortunately I'm having to write this on my phone because Mozilla Help won't let me log in because of 'unexpected error' which I think is it timing out. I've done a full Malwarebytes scan and a full Bullguard scan with no hits, full adwcleaner with nothing, I've reset Firefox, deleted the cache and cookies and have Tracking set to Strict and still no joy.
Can anyone suggest what is wrong and what I can do to fix it?
Opaite Mbohovái (3)
What's your computer system and Firefox version?
Make sure you are not blocking content.
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link}
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-slow-how-make-it-faster
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-many-cpu-resources-how-fix
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-responding
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-takes-long-time-start-up
I'm currently on Firefox 72.0.1, on Windows 8.1 64-bit (it updated again when I tried restarting my laptop earlier). The problem has been around since v72, and possibly a couple of versions prior to that.
I have tried Safe Mode and it made no difference, and neither did refreshing Firefox and clearing the cache and cookies. I was worried from the site names that were coming up that it was a whole bunch of tracking cookies, but they come up regardless of whether the cookies have just been cleared or not (I've been logged out of pages, accounts etc. so I'm happy it's worked in that sense). I tried Chrome (sorry!) to see if that had any issues. It was a lot faster than Firefox was but still took over two minutes to load google.co.uk, even after resetting and removing the cookies and cache as before.
I also tried clearing the DNS cache in Windows and rebooting, and it seems to be working as normal again now. Pages are loading in seconds instead of minutes, although I have noticed that the same types of pages are still showing on the bottom left (i.salecycle.com, www.google-analytics.com etc) but a lot faster and without as many redirections.
I'm still not sure whether these pages are anything to be worried about - two full antivirus scans can't find anything (which I know doesn't mean there isn't something) and clearing cookies didn't seem to make a difference. Is there anything else I can do to stop this from happening again?
Go to the Mozilla Add-ons Web Page {web Link} (There’s a lot of good stuff here) and search a good ad blocker.
You may have ad/mal-ware. Further information can be found in this article; https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-caused-malware?cache=no
Run most or all of the listed malware scanners. Each works differently. If one program misses something, another may pick it up.