How to tell Firefox to skip to the next server (WebSense Problem)

Question

We are using WebSense at work, my problem is that they are blocking several sites (ads.google, tweetmeme.com, etc.), that are used in many of the sites I visit, the problem with is that I cant surf a lot of sites anymore, for example trying to go to http://channel9.msdn.com/ it get stuck on loading something from tweetmeme.com (literally waiting hours).

So my question is how can i configure firefox with some kind of timeout so that if the site does not respond in x minutes skip it and try to download the rest of the page. this happens on firefox 3.6.8 and 4 beta 2

Thanks for your time

Juan Zamudio

Answer 1

It sounds like your company's WebSense firewall is pretending to be those sites and accepting connections and requests, but not sending any response back and keeping the connection open. This causes Firefox to just keep waiting forever.

Here are some possible solutions.

• If you can install Firefox Add-Ons, you might try an add-on that will block the problematic addresses altogether. For example, you can install Adblock Plus and add the following filters

  http://tweetmeme.com/*
http://*.tweetmeme.com/*

• If you are on a Windows computer and can download and run executable files, you can try using TCPView to close stalling connections. For example, in the list of connections, you can find the connection from Firefox to tweetmeme.com:http, right-click on it and choose Close Connection. This might be tiresome for regular use, but could be useful if you only need to workaround the stalls occasionally, or to help confirm exactly which sites the firewall is stalling.

(Frustratingly, it looks like Firefox did at one time have a setting to time-out when a server accepted a connection but gave no response -- network.http.request.timeout -- but this functionality was removed.)