Firefox 23.0.1 broke ALL the sites (workaround tip)

Well, not all of them, but a significant portion of them that I visit. I think it has to do with the new mixed SSL content blocking they implemented. I'm not a developer, and can't be too sure, but that's the only major change that I can see that could have caused this. While the goal is admirable, a quick internet search shows this seems to be a growing issue with the broken sites.
I do a lot of online focus group stuff in my free time, and am in a few very tiny gamer forums akin to private sites when I'm not hibernating on ATS, but couldn't access anything but a blank page. This was seriously frustrating like no other. Until they debut a whitelist feature, I think this would be the workaround if anyone else has this issue:

In the address bar, type about:config and let it bring up the entry page. It'll tell you yada yada about voiding the warranty, just click "I'll be careful, I promise" and click the button. In the search bar, type mixed, and it should bring you to a short little list of 4 items. You want to toggle security.mixed_content.block_active_content to false. Restart FF & that should turn off the mixed content blocking & solve any broken website issues.

Hope this helped anyone that was blindsided by the 0.1 update!

reply to post by Nyiah


I just installed FF 23.01 and clicked on every bookmark in my arsenal - and could not reproduce your results. Under "Help" there is an option called "Firefox health report" - perhaps clicking it might shed some light on the problem?

The one thing that comes to mind is that plug-ins or add-ons from an older version might be causing a conflict.

reply to post by Hefficide

I did disable all of my add-ons & plug-ins before fiddling with the config area, which aren't many in total (8 extensions, 6 plug-ins) That didn't solve the problem, so I turned off the mixed content block, and voila, site access.

I can't give out the focus group sites per the privacy clauses, nor the gamer forums (invite-only) I re-enabled mixed content blocking for a few minutes after your post, Heff. I can confirm for anyone who does paid surveys, that I had every survey launch from Ipsos, Global Test Market, Opinion Outpost, and Toluna fail while mixed content blocking was active (blank pages) Disabling the MC block again resolved the problem. Whatever the common set-up between focus groups, survey pages, and private forums are, it definitely results in broken sites & pages.

i dont use firefox now but when i did, using the reset function usually ironed out any problems, maybe you could try that.

Just a thought. But that problem sounds a bit like a corrupted hosts file. I have run Firefox for years. Interesting quirk, if it is indeed a Firefox bug. Thanks for the heads up.

ETA: Unless you are using a proxy, you might want to set Firefox for "No Proxy", and also turn off hardware acceleration.