Following up from my update of several weeks ago... I continue to have no further problems with this issue since I changed to "Use system proxy setting"... So, for whatever reason(s), the hamsters under the hood seem happier, and in my case this has been the solution at a practical level and I've not had to tinker with Firefox settings since then.

Just out of curiosity, if someone who's on the Firefox developer team that covers this type of issue could weigh in, it would be interesting to know what, empirically testing-wise, is likely at root cause.

Zero sense to the answer. We call that FKS- False Knowledge Syndrome. The proxy settings are not being rest or it would be universal. It has to be an expiring certificate for the encryption- but that is a Firefox programming issue. If the proxy settings were being reset it would not kick you out or are you forgetting the placement cookies. You can be set to stay logged in and shut sown the computer and whee you come back up and the setting are reconfigured, even to the same as before (most likely) your login would still be there. Something else is expiring and it has nothing to do with proxy settings that are secondary in control.

Hi jazezweineman,

You apparently recognise this may not be a universal problem. As you say

 The proxy settings are not being rest or it would be universal.

So it seems odd that you object to users trying troubleshooting options. It is possible in a thread like this; with multiple questions; that users are having more than one single problem, and so would you not agree multiple suggestions/solutions could be beneficial ?

Also if you consider you have discovered the cause of the problem why not share that knowledge with fellow users, preferably with proper Steps To Reproduce. If it is a Firefox problem or a Firefox regression someone could file a bug about this, but that can not be done until someone does investigate/troubleshoot.

If you really wish to help you could even file a bug yourself that would be very useful as it would get developers attention and start the process of getting a fix.

May I ask another favour: if you do suggest to users that they install previous versions of Firerfox, it would be appreciated if you remind them that such versions are NOT secure.
(You may run thousands of computers, so almost all users will be less knowledgeable than you; remember they may be minimally security aware).

Thanks John

Not really. If you have experience in the field, trying to get inexperienced users to do things by steps that they really have no understanding of leads to usually- more problems. There are more than likely multiple problems with users and their computers. However, we are dealing with Firefox here. It s not my role to be doing field testing for Mozilla. We have enough to do with Microsoft in that direction. So I have to make a judgement that depending on their virus protection that they are less secure with 12 than 14, but with certain antivirus programs such as SEP 12.1 they loose use of the Symantec Intrusion Protection. So you tell me. Do I want to run a faulty and buggy browser that has minimal security differences with version 12 and not have the use of Symantec Intrusion protection or use one that is not but about 5 months older and have the use of Symantec Intrusion Protection.?

Further what I meant by Universal was universal to the operating system, not of the users with problems.

Update,

It appears this may now be a known and ?fixed issue? but I do not immediately see the related bug report so am seeking clarification, I hope to post back with further information soon.

Sorry, passed my bedtime, I misread something. An unrelated issue was fixed.

I also note this thread only currently shows 22 me too votes for this week,that is not many, some threads collect hundreds f votes per week and have multiple similar threads, it is likely therefore not to be a very common problem

John99, Are you able to determine and share from those that worked on the resolution what the underlying bug(s) were, what was "causing" the problem? Thanks!

sorry my bad, no further info

P.S. It may be worth looking at:
With default SPDY enabled in FF13.0 cannot connect to Gmail /questions/928731
(Bug 762162 - Cannot connect to Gmail and Twitter with SPDY on )

Ok not sure my reply posted so i'll do it again.

This is specific to Yahoo mail glitches

I am no rocket scientist but.....running FF 14 and went the simple route of changing proxy setting to "system" and all is well and i had more glitches than the sign in thing.

Unless the glitches are system specific the proxy change should work.
Try it before ripping the balls off the FOX ;-)

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Unfortunately I spoke too soon wrt FF 14 solving the problem. I'm still getting session timeouts, only not as often (maybe once a day now). I can't use the System proxy setting and need to set Auto Detect because I use a VPN to connect to my network at work.

This proxy server issue is a desperate grab at a non-issue. Unless someone can tell this poor old MCSE who manages more than 12,000 computer currently, how that would affect Yahoo ( I do not like Gmail and it's restrictive policies on attachments-so I will not comment on them).

Just as a refresher for those that really many not understand a proxy

A proxy or proxy server is basically another computer which serves as a hub through which internet requests are processed. By connecting through one of these servers, your computer sends your requests to the proxy server which then processes your request and returns what you were wanting. In this way it serves as an intermediary between your home machine and the rest of the computers on the internet. Proxies are used for a number of reasons such as to filter web content, to go around restrictions such as parental blocks, to screen downloads and uploads and to provide anonymity when surfing the internet.

If you are wanting to surf the web anonymously then proxies can provide you with a means to hide your home IP address from the rest of the world. By connecting to the internet through proxies, the home IP address of your machine will not be shown but rather the IP of the proxy server will be shown. This can provide you with more privacy then if you were simply connecting directly to the internet. There are number of proxies that can provide you with service. You can find a list of these simply by typing "Proxy List" into any search engine. There are some proxies which are free and some which charge money.

Since you are, in most cases (99.5%) not be using a proxy, then what would changing setting accomplish in a browser. If this happened in Chrome, Opera and IE, I might rethink, but one browser and one site (that I know of) does not add up. Whatever Yahoo needs from a standpoint of encryption, security certificates or whatever to say logged on is not being provided by or consistently being provide by Firefox 13 and above. I do take note that even on computers that could care less about yahoo email, that the flash player and the plug-in container are constantly crashing in Firefox 13 and 14. I am not trying to be negative, but offer alternative thinking of where the problem could be.

@jazzwineman, I totally agree that changing the proxy settings shouldn't impact Yahoo mail session timeout issues. The fact, however, is that it does impact it. I can reliably reproduce the problem on Firefox 13 and 14 by changing the proxy setting to auto-detect. The fact that Yahoo never gave me such problems with Firefox until I upgraded to version 13 and the fact that this behavior doesn't appear with other browsers appears to indicate that the problem is with Firefox and not with Yahoo. Also, the fact that other users are able to workaround the problem in the same way would appear to corroborate this. As a software developer the rule I live by when debugging a problem is "when you've tried everything that makes sense and still haven't fixed the problem, start trying things that don't make sense." So while the proxy settings don't appear to make sense for this issue, it's hard to argue with the evidence which is that they do in fact have an impact. Hopefully Mozilla will figure out why.

I suspect that the problem isn't whether or not a proxy is enabled, but rather with the auto-detect. If I have auto-detect enabled, I have the session timeout problem both when I'm connected to my corporate network and when I'm not. I haven't verified this yet, but also suspect that if I connect to my corporate network and manually set the proxy settings that I won't have a Yahoo mail problem. I'm fairly convinced that there's a bug in the Firefox proxy auto-detect code somewhere - it's doing something it shouldn't be doing.

Update on last post: When I manually entered the proxy settings when connected to my corporate network I did not experience the Yahoo mail timeout. The problem does appear to be specifically related to the auto-detect setting. I have no clue why that setting and Yahoo mail seem to be incompatible all of a sudden with FF 13, but there it is.

Well folks, I was an early contributor to this discussion. The solution mentioned early on had something to do with Proxies or something like that. I did it and it worked. I don't remember the exact solution.

I just upgraded from Fire Fox 13 to 14.5 and the problem instantly came back. Yahoo mail keeps asking me for a log in every time I click on another category or log into yahoo mail. So whatever setting I had done to fix the problem a month or so ago has disappeared with the upgrade to 14.5. I frankly, do not have the patience to go back to the beginning of this thread to see how to fix the problem again!

In the mean time I have tried Chrome because of this issue and also because Firefox has issues with Norton ID safe. I find Chrome to be faster with many nice features. Several things annoy me about Chrome, like the narrow scroll bars and no up arrow on the scroll bars but I have pretty much had it with Firefox. I have been a Firefox user for ten years but no more- I am migrating to Chrome. I will keep an eye on this thread and if the issue is finally positively fixed without me having to make a bunch of changes that I don't understand may start using Firefox again - somewhat.

Thank you Firefox for the many years as a great browser but I am done with you for now, and perhaps forever.

Parting is such sweet sorrow . . .

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Hi Flyingwriter, just to review, you go to this dialog and set either "No proxy" or "Use system proxy settings":

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Options > Advanced > Network > "Setting" button

But that is not the correct answer. You still do not have the problem of Flash Player and the plug-in container issues solved for 13 or 14, beyond the Yahoo issue. Why do you think the problem is with PCs and not Macs???

Hi jazzwineman, I don't know whether you are addressing my post or a different post, or meant to post in a different thread, but I'm not aware of any relation between the Yahoo logout issue and Flash player issues. What is new since the June 8th release of Flash 11.3 is the impact of its new "protected mode" feature, available only in Firefox and only on Windows Vista and Windows 7. If you are affected by that, I suggest you consider disabling protected mode since that feature is currently being debugged. See this support article from Adobe under the heading "Last Resort": Adobe Forums: How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?

When, when, when will I be loved foxfire????? Why have you not spoken with yahoo and resolved this issue foxfire people??? I got kicked off during the very important creation of a business document 10 times....not good foxfire. Bad!!! Bad upgrade and tinkering with settings does not resolve the issue. How about a clean functional upgrade to repair the jacked up-- upgrade that has so many users up in arms. What say you foxfire people????

locked by a moderator - too many posters haven't bothered to read and implement the suggestions that have been posted in this thread - plus this thread has gone off topic a number of times, which just confuses the issue

This thread is solved for the "owner" of this thread. If you need help solving this or a seemingly similar problem, please Ask a new question and provide the requested information.