Safari Problem

[AppleCrisp]

Hi,
For the past month or so, ever since I got Leopard, both Safari and Firefox have been acting up. In Safari, sometimes it fails to display a bunch of pictures, and instead shows a small white box. Also, in Firefox, the very same thing happens as well. Also, for example, on the CNN website it fails to display video when viewing a video, only playing the sound. Does anyone have a solution for these browser problems?

 

[Makosuke]

I'm not so sure those are related issues, and I'm definitely not seeing them, so they're not universal.

The picture issue could be a number of things, but if it's happening in both browsers simultaneously, it sounds rather like the sites are serving images from a different server (common on big sites) and that site isn't making a connection. I've seen this now and then, but it's not an OS issue when I've seen it--either a glitch on the serving site, or a network error (DNS?) that's preventing the site from being accessed.

It could, however, be caused by QuickTime somehow trying to display the images rather than the browsers' own image display algorithm. You could check and make sure QT doesn't have file types assigned to it that it shouldn't.

The no video issue has got to be Flash--isn't that the format CNN serves video in? Either it's (again) QT trying to play the Flash files (it may have the sound codec in its basic Flash implementation, but not the video one), or it could just be Adobe's plugin acting up--do you have the latest version?

To assist with troubleshooting, does it go away after a bit, or do you have to quit and reopen the browser? If quitting an re-opening a browser DOESN'T help, that points to something external or maybe an OS level issue...

 

[AppleCrisp]

To answer your question, the problem has persisted since it started, it doesn't go away no matter how many times I close my browser, restart my computer, or even reinstall Safari or Firefox.

 

[HLdan]

I would recommend that you perform an Archive and Install. This should resolve your issue as it dumps your old system folder and creates a brand new one with all your programs and settings remaining in place.

 

[Makosuke]

Before you go for the full reinstall, try a couple of things:

1) Try creating a new account and see if it's the same there. That's an easy way to rule out something in your user settings before doing a reinstall.

2) Do you have access to any other computers you could connect to the same internet connection (a friend's laptop, maybe, or an older Mac)? If so, do they behave the same? Just seems worth ruling out a network issue.

If 1 doesn't help and it's fine with 2, then it probably is something wanky in the OS. You could try to fix it, but an archive and install might indeed be the fastest way to clean out whatever is causing the problem.