Firefox Plugin Download Delay

[Makosuke]

I've been having a weird issue with Firefox where downloading plugins--and ONLY plugins--takes a very long time (at least a minute) to start. It's got me curious what's up, so I'm fishing for suggestions. Google didn't help, or at least my search-fu was weak.

This happens whether I go to the official plugin site or use the built-in Firefox plug-in update system--either way, there's a ridiculously long delay between starting the plugin download and when it actually begins. Once it gets going, it downloads quickly and installs normally.

At first I thought it was just a temporary glitch, but it's continued to happen for at least a month now, and happened with both 3.0 and 3.5.

I'm assuming it's got to be something with my internet connection, but EVERYTHING else works perfectly, both from within Firefox and elsewhere.

Any guesses as to what might be up?

 

[angelwatt]

Do the add-on URLs have a https? I occasionally have problems with secure web sites where they load horribly slow (minutes). It was only happening for two sites and after a while fixed itself. I've updated browsers since too so that may have helped. It may have something to do with some security settings on your machine or an outdated certificate. Hard to say as I never found the true reason.

 

[Makosuke]

Hmm... interesting thought on that. The actual site appears to be releases.mozilla.org, though I can't tell from the interface if it's asking for https.

More significantly, I played around with releases.mozilla.org, which appears to do an invisible redirect (forgetting the technical term right now, but the URL doesn't change) to any of a number of specific mirror sites. I can get the mirrors to come up almost instantly in Camino (when I use http; https doesn't seem to respond), while Firefox takes the same long delay before responding to each request (if you click a link once it does eventually load, that is, another delay. And, if I enter one of the mirror URLs directly (University of Idaho) in Firefox, it loads normally and I can install plugins from it manually as would be expected, with no delay.

Thus the issue seems to be Firefox choking on the redirect somehow until, I assume, some timeout has elapsed. The behavior appears to be the same on another computer at home, and Safari also has the delay (but not Camino--bizarre) so I guess it's something weird going on with my internet connection, though it's hardly anything fancy--just AT&T DSL with a gigabit AEBS. Local firewall isn't even on.

Now I'm really curious as to what's going on since I've never had an issue with anything else, period, and obviously the connections are capable of going through normally since Camino works.