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Bizarre problem with Google
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I have SliTaz 3.0 running on the following system:
Dell Inspiron 3000
233 MHz Pentium MMX
208 MB RAM
2 GB HDD
I'm connecting to the Internet using a PCMCIA wireless card. Firefox will get on the web and browse just the way it's supposed to, with one exception: I'm having lots of strange problems with Google-related services (web search, image search, anything associated with Google).
I can access www.google.com. However, while the page will display, it will never fully load. The status bar will show "Waiting for www.google.com..." forever. Then, if I try to follow any of the links on the page (the one that says "About Google," for example), nothing will happen. It will start loading, but get stuck at "Waiting for www.google.com" and never display.
So far, I have determined that this problem is related to the cookies that Google sets. If I disable cookies in Firefox altogether, Google will load and the links will function correctly. However, with cookies disabled, there are still some Google pages that will never display (including, ironically, some sections of Google's support site). Note that simply going into "Exceptions" under Firefox's cookie settings and blocking www.google.com will NOT work. Cookies have to be completely disabled in the browser.
Two pieces of evidence lead me to conclude that this is not a Firefox-specific bug. Firstly, Midori exhibits exactly the same behavior. With cookies enabled, all Google services are completely FUBAR. With cookies disabled, things get better, but some pages still refuse to load. Secondly, neither browser exhibits this behavior if I run the SliTaz live CD on my newer desktop system. Both browsers load and browse Google pages with no problem on this system. Thus, the problem is tied neither to Firefox nor to SliTaz. It has something to do with my Inspiron 3000.
Again, on my Inspiron, I can browse any site other than Google, even comparatively complex ones such as Amazon and eBay. Some of my earlier investigations pointed towards IPv6 being the culprit. However, as SliTaz's IPv6 module is not installed, I can't see how it could be causing problems. Considering how much I depend upon Google services, this is kind of a big deal. Does anybody have any ideas as to what is going on here?
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Well, you could try installing the fasterfox lite plugin, then going to it's options/settings and advanced and disabling IPv6 lookups.
Another option is to install adblock plus and cookie culler. Together they can be used to block unwanted cookies, while protecting the ones you want and use.
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Thanks for your help. I appear to have discovered a workaround. By installing the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox and changing my user agent to Windows / Internet Explorer 8, I've been able to get Google to behave normally. I have NO idea why this works. Only thing I can come up with is that for some reason, Google doesn't like to see the i586 tag in my default user agent. Weird...
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Actually I can explain that. Internet Explorer doesn't support anything higher than css 1 (and we're currently on css 2, with bits of css 3 thrown in by most clients). So while google thinks your using IE8, it's falling back on older and IE compatible css templates.
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Uh-oh... looks like I spoke too soon. Switching my user agent to IE8 fixes Google's problems when cookies are disabled. Re-enable cookies, however, and the problem persists. The thing about css is interesting, though... I'll have to investigate further along that path.
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Update: I booted up the latest version of Puppy Linux on this machine and ran into exactly the same problem. Interesting... Right now, I'm thinking my PCMCIA wireless card might be the problem. It's a D-Link DWL-G630 that came free with an old router. Next step will be to get my hands on a different wireless card and try it out. Once the holidays are over, I could also try logging into my school's network to see if anything changes.
By the way, this is the first time I've tried Puppy Linux, but so far it seems like SliTaz is the superior distro. Puppy's GUI feels a little cluttered, and it appears to eat up more RAM than SliTaz does. Puppy may be a more mature distribution with a bigger user base, but I think SliTaz does a better job of packing a usable desktop system into a tiny ISO.
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Looks like I've finally gotten to the bottom of this. I tried the wireless card on another laptop and got the same problem with Google. This laptop also has a wired ethernet port, which can be used to access Google with no problems. The fault therefore lies with the D-Link DWL-G630 PCMCIA wireless card. Must not be fully standards-compliant, or something. Now I just have to find a new wireless card, and I'll have a slow but usable machine for basic internet access.
QED
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Okay, now I've REALLY found a solution. Using a different PCMCIA wireless card didn't help. Long story short, it turned out to be a router problem. Apparently on my router (Linksys WRH54G), WEP security + PCMCIA wireless = extremely low MTU, which led to problems with Google. Switching my network from WEP to WPA seems to have fixed it. Not sure why I'd been using WEP for all these years, to be honest... must have had some problems with WPA back in the day.
For the record, this is officially the weirdest bug I have ever run into... ever.
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