Okay I was using suse 9.2 I recently switch to fedora core 4 to see if my firefox would work normally (I also had this problem with suse 9.2). I can't remember my setup with suse 9.2, but with Fedora 4 I installed both the firewall and SELinux along with the distro version of firefox (I believe 1.0.6) It will work about 60% of the time on google, but will not work at all with gmail or hotmail and many other sites that should work. it is timing out a lot on these sites that should work. My konqueror works all the time without any problems. I tried to disable the firewall through the UI (I'm using KDE) I also tried to disable SELinux. currently both are disabled and nothing has changed. I tried uninstalling the distro version and I installed the 1.0.7 version from firefox's website. It still had the same problem. I've also tried installing the distro version, then using yum to upgrade to version 1.0.7 and I get the same problem. If anyone can think of anything else it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Welcome to LQ.

I doubt if it is a firewall problem if konqeror works.

Perhaps you could tell us what doesn't work. Are there any errors? Something not loading?

Let me try to explain it a little better. It will either load the page normally or it will give me a time out error. for example google will load correctly about 60 percent of the time, but the rest of the time I get a "site" could not be found error.
Some sites I can't get to load at all for example gmail will not load at all. I hope that is enough information. Thanks for your Help

Laminac.

The only reason I can think of for timeouts is slow DNS. Try pinging www.google.com and then it's ip address. If it's significantly slower when using the url then it's likely a DNS issue. The part about Konqueror working perfectly is puzzling. I would expect Konqueror and any other browser to use the same file, /etc/resolv.conf. Open it and see what's in it. It's supposed to be a list of available name servers. A lot of times it will have the name of the local network at the top and that will slow it down because it looks there first. Your ISP should give you two nameserver addresses. Put those as the only two entries in that file.

you are a genius! that worked. I can now access gmail! Thank you very much. it was the resolv.conf file. it had the gateway 192.168.0.1 so I took that out and now it runs fine. Thanks again.

Laminac