Firefox and Ancestry

[Mutley]

Is anyone else having a problem waiting for pages to load in Ancestry?

While loading, it says "waiting for c.cmfcreative.com". I googled it and it seems to be a problem with Firefox.
The instructions to stop it happening were very complicated. Remove this, take out that, change this and delete that. Oh tis fraught and I don't like fraught these days.

What if I use IE for Ancestry or is that having the same problems?

[terrysfamily]

My Ancestry is fine and loading without any problems but have had problems with facebook. I think it's a lucky dip tonight.

[Mutley]

It's been going on for a few months now and is driving me, even more bonkers, than I already was/were/is/am.

Take a chill pill Mut.

[arthurk]

Hi Mutley

I don't think I managed to track down the pages you found by googling, but it does seem a bit odd. I'm not getting this problem, using Firefox on Windows 7.

c.mfcreative.com (slightly different from what you wrote) appears to be the domain where Ancestry gets all its images from, so obviously it's important that you can access it. All I've found to help so far seems to implicate either one particular version of the Ancestry image viewer, or a Firefox add-on (Adblock Plus) - though as far as I could make out, these were all in fairly old posts, and later versions of the viewer and/or add-on might have fixed things. Would you be able to find the page you were at again and post the link?

I'm not at all confident of being able to help you, but to give me (or more likely someone else) a fighting chance, please could you say a bit more about your set-up: (a) what add-ons you have in Firefox; (b) what your Firefox cookie settings are (Tools > Options > Privacy - what is ticked/unticked, and when you click the Exceptions button, is there an entry for either Ancestry or c.mfcreative.com - and if so, is it Allow or Block or something else?); (c) which image viewer you are using at Ancestry.

Another thing to check (though I doubt it will be this) is in Tools > Options > Content - make sure "Load images automatically" is ticked, and that the Exceptions (click button on the right) don't include Ancestry or c.mfcreative.com.

Sorry I can't help more. Failing all else, have you tried asking Ancestry's tech support? I've sometimes found them a bit slow, but they might know more than I do!

Arthur

[Mutley]

Hello Arthur,
Thanks for taking the time to reply and you are quite right, it is c.mfcreative.
I cannot see the wood for the trees and added an extra 'c'.
I think it stood for confused.

The site I found where another person had a similar problem was
https://
forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2450171
The poster explained it better than I could but the replies confused me. I think I must be getting old, it sounds like something from Starwars.

I'm not at all confident of being able to help you, but to give me (or more likely someone else) a fighting chance, please could you say a bit more about your set-up: (a) what add-ons you have in Firefox; (b) what your Firefox cookie settings are (Tools > Options > Privacy - what is ticked/unticked, and when you click the Exceptions button, is there an entry for either Ancestry or c.mfcreative.com - and if so, is it Allow or Block or something else?); (c) which image viewer you are using at Ancestry.

I'm using Windows 7 and Adobe is up to date but as regards your other questions I will have to go and look.

Another thing to check (though I doubt it will be this) is in Tools > Options > Content - make sure "Load images automatically" is ticked, and that the Exceptions (click button on the right) don't include Ancestry or c.mfcreative.com.

I will also go an look at this.

Thank you. I will report back...

[arthurk]

The site I found where another person had a similar problem was
https://
forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2450171
The poster explained it better than I could but the replies confused me. I think I must be getting old, it sounds like something from Starwars.

Having read that, it seems that it might be something to do with which version of the viewer you use at Ancestry. However, I'm not at all sure that going into Firefox safe mode will help you - but then I'm not an expert.

You may want to check that Adobe is fully up to date, as there have been a few updates recently. The latest version of Flash for Windows is 11.4.402.265 - if you go to www.
adobe.com/software/flash/about/ the page will tell you if you have this.

Another thing that's just occurred to me is the size of your cache in Firefox. Have a look in Tools > Options > Network, and the section headed Cached Web Content. This is where you set the amount of space Firefox can use on your hard drive for storing temporary versions of webpages. If you have it on automatic, it can use up to 1024MB - and I seem to remember that I had some performance issues when I had mine at that size. When you revisit a site, in theory it's quicker to get files from the cache than downloading them again, but I wondered if there were so many files in there that it was taking an age to work out if it had the ones it needed or not. Until recently I had mine set at (I think) 75MB, and it did seem faster than when on auto - but then when we had an issue with download limits it occurred to me that if I set it higher, some things wouldn't need to be downloaded so often. So now it's at 200MB, and it still seems to be working OK. (Of course, if you reduce the size of your cache, you will lose some of the temporary files that are stored there, so if it's important to you to keep them, don't do it!)

That's all I can think of for now, but I'll wait to hear what else you come up with.

Arthur

[Mutley]

Thank you Athur, I do appreciate your advice.

please could you say a bit more about your set-up: (a) what add-ons you have in Firefox; (b) what your Firefox cookie settings are (Tools > Options > Privacy - what is ticked/unticked, and when you click the Exceptions button, is there an entry for either Ancestry or c.mfcreative.com - and if so, is it Allow or Block or something else?); (c) which image viewer you are using at Ancestry.

(a) Add ons are just Adblock Plus 2.1.2, British English Dictionary 1.19.1 and Clippings 3.1.7.
(b) There are loads of Cookies, I have given up on them as every site you visit now seems to include them or you cannot use it.
Both Ancestry and c.mfcreative.com are allowed.
(c) I don't know which image viewer I am using on Ancestry, I have looked all over the site and cannot find this information.

Another thing to check (though I doubt it will be this) is in Tools > Options > Content - make sure "Load images automatically" is ticked, and that the Exceptions (click button on the right) don't include Ancestry or c.mfcreative.com.

"Load images automatically" is ticked and both sites are not an Exception.
Adobe version is 11.4.402.265, the latest.

Now to the Cache....
It stated that I was currently using 1.0 GB of disc space.
The cache was limited to 1024 MB
I changed it to 200 MB and the circle went around and around and around. Firefox finally stopped responding.
I loaded Firefox again and now it is currently using at 4.3 MB and the limit is back to 1024MB.

Another point which may be important and I forgot to mention is that if I click a search or link in Ancestry and get fed up with waiting for the response, I click the back arrow, click the link or search again and it loads instantly. That does save the waiting forever but it is still a nuisance.

Thanks again for you advice. I will post back on Ancestry's behaviour. If I am alone in my suffering, I presume it must be something else on my PC and not the two sites in question.

[David Benson]

Another point which may be important and I forgot to mention is that if I click a search or link in Ancestry and get fed up with waiting for the response, I click the back arrow, click the link or search again and it loads instantly. That does save the waiting forever but it is still a nuisance.

This often happens to me - on random sites, not Anc as I don't use them. I don't use Firefox either but Chrome - so it seems to be something in the ether that's giving us the odd headache.

[arthurk]

I occasionally find pages slow to load, but I haven't noticed it at Ancestry, but stopping it loading and clicking refresh usually seems to work. I hadn't thought of it being a browser issue, more that sites were being slow.

Anyway, to your Ancestry issue: I don't think I can offer any great pearls of wisdom, but might either of the following help?
https://
adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7245
https://
boards.ancestry.co.uk/topics.ancestry.ancsite/11802.1.1.1/mb.ashx

A couple of other thoughts:
1) Cookies can multiply more or less ad infinitum, but I don't think they'll be the problem here unless you've blocked them from either Ancestry (.co.uk & .com) or mfcreative.com. I think I've worked out how to keep them more or less under control in Firefox, so if you'd like some ideas on that some time, ask again - probably in a new thread.
2) Somewhere I read that Firefox also tends to store your browsing history for ever, and this can slow things down. (History is the list of sites you've been to, cache is the actual content.) Like the cache, if you really need to keep it, that's fine, but personally I don't really feel the need. Firefox's Clear Recent History (in Tools) seems to be more about covering your tracks relating to your very recent activity, but you can go into the Library ("Show All History"), and manually delete the older entries while keeping the newer ones. There's also an add-on (Precise Clear History) which helps you to do this in Clear Recent History, and another one (Expire History by Days) which automatically deletes everything over xx days old (set by you).

However, while these two things may help to keep things generally running smoothly, I'm not really convinced that they're the root of your problem at Ancestry. Since people have had problems there with Adblock Plus, that might be where I'd investigate next, but I've never used it so can't offer any ideas.

Finally, on the Ancestry Viewer - when you (eventually) get to see an image, click Options and it should tell you which it is. If you've been told you need Flash for it, it sounds like the new (Advanced) one; the Standard one used to need to be specifically installed, and I think probably still does.

Arthur

[Mutley]

Thanks again Arthur for all your time and trouble.
It seems to be running a bit better today, only 2-3 waits out of 10 clicks instead of 9 out of 10.
A considerable improvement so i think something has worked.

I don't have a problem with any other site only Ancestry so I will check out the Adblock Plus. I always stay logged into Ancestry but one of your links suggested logging out completely and logging back in again so I will find my password and try that.

I really do appreciate your help.