Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Why won't it load?!

As much as I would like to read Macworld online, it would seem that such is beyond my set-up.

No matter how long I allow for an item to load, Macworld continues "transferring data", the result of which is a blank screen.

For example, wanting to read the Disk Warrior 4 review (at http://www.macworld.com/article/1055169/diskwarrior4.html), even after a half hour it was still "transferring data". In the meantime I was able to load several newspapers, several articles within same, monitor FTM forums, read and send email, etc. And if I don't attempt any other item, even after 15 minutes Macworld is still "transferring data".

Macworld must include a humongous amount of extraneous material in their pages and a lot of it must be encoded in a fashion which is somehow inimical to my system.

It may be related to my slow dial-up transfer speed (4-5 KB/s), because if I use a Mac or PC running Firefox on a broadband/high-speed connection, the problem doesn't exist.

Anybody know what's going on? More important, is there some way to work around the problem?

That page loaded just fine for me with broadband. Have you tried deleting Macworld cookies and/or emptying the Safari cache? That may not help but it won't hurt either.

That was my point: Anything other than dial-up does not present the problem.

Macworld cookies deleted numerous times. No help.

Firefox cache cleared several times. No help.
(I don't/won't use Safari.)

While I responded to your post, the Appleinsider article you recommended in another thread loaded in its entirety.

not even for testing purposes?

The Activity window in Safari is a great way to see what's having trouble when a page loads.

Thanks, but the activity bar in Firefox pretty much gives me the same information. That's how I've observed Macworld's interminable "Transferring data from www.macworld.com..." (to be more specific than earlier), where it seems to stall out for minutes at a time, and inferred that there's a whopping big chunk of (to me irrelevant) extraneous material (probably advertising and links to social media, for example) on that website.
I have prohibited all links to social media from setting cookies and images universally.

Have you tried hitting the Stop button or its keyboard equivalent (command-period) (or choosing the View menu's Stop command)? In certain situations that will result in a browser's displaying all the content that's been loaded thus far.

Thanks, but there's no stop button anywhere I could find and the View menu (in Firefox) doesn't have such a choice. I did try command-period, but still a blank screen.

I did finally get to a broadband set-up and the Macworld article loaded in a split second, almost before I finished clicking the mouse.

Disappointingly, the article relates to a product which saw the light of day in 2007, so I don't know how useful DW4 might be in this day and age. Methinks I'll just live with Lion's Disk Utility.

I have a stop icon in the Firefox 11.0 toolbar, to the right of the address bar. Which version are you using? It looks like X.

The Stop button is the "X" mark* behind the URL in the Navigation toolbar. I'm somewhat surprised that you didn't find the Stop command (with the Command-period keyboard shortcut) in the View menu. FWIW, TenFourFox (the PPC Firefox variant) v10.0.x sports both. But the fact that you mentioned the white screen suggests that your Mac somehow is churning away at something. Perhaps that Stop command needs some time to penetrate...

Anyway, I too find that accessing MacWorld pages to be associated with numerous data requests from 3rd party sites. I know this from Little Snitch's frequent permission dialogs when perusing the MacWorld site. By denying most requests (some deal with the content I want) I effectively stop associated content from loading, and I wonder if this might also provide some sort of alternative solution for your access problems.

Short of you trying this yourself (LS has a rather short 3 hour trial built in), we'd need to know which sites are the hangup in your case. However, if your problem is mostly www.macworld.com, then Little Snitch will not likely be a big help as you obviously wouldn't want to block access to it.

Finally, the fact that the current version DW originally saw the light in 2007 doesn't mean much: the current version 4.4 still is an effective tool for all current versions of Mac OS X, and Disk Utility is absolutely no match for it. In addition to the 4.x updates to DW attention has been paid to the utility's startup disc, which requires updates with each iteration of Mac OS X as well as with new Mac models.


*) The "X" is only visible when a page is loading. Once loaded it changes to the circular Refresh arrow.

Many thanks for the additional info.

Indeed, the X button is the stop button in Firefox. I don't know what I was thinking. I use it often, especially when sites get hung up on loading, and that often resolves the problem (as you noted). In Macworld's case I've tried it repeatedly (eg, over a half hour of churning) — to no avail.

And yes, the Stop command (⌘.) is likewise in the View menu; I must have been in a different window when I looked for it.

I guess that the bottom line is the third-party sites which I disallow which are the culprit. Too bad, but I'm not changing my 'preferential paranoia' to make Macworld happy.

I don't think that the trouble loading the MacWorld page is (directly) related to using dial-up or broadband. I *do* think it's related to who your ISP is; that is to say, if you had broadband using the same routing as your dial-up connection were using, it wouldn't load, and if you had a dial-up connection using the same routing as a broadband connection that works, it would work.

The page loads for me (on Comcast). However, when i try to load it through proxies, it fails to load; it just keeps trying forever.

The culprit appears to be a number of connections to gigya.com. MacWorld's pages make multiple connections to cdn.gigya.com, which is a "social media infrastructure" company that allows Webmasters to add things like comments and registration to their sites. If you place a comment on a MacWorld page, the comment isn't handled by MacWorld's servers and you don't register for an account on MacWorld's servers. You actually create your account and place your comment (or read other people's comments) from servers run by gigya.com. They provide all the interactive social media stuff for Macworld (and, I gather, a bunch of other people's sites).

Anyway, when the page refuses to load, it seems that it's choking on trying to contact gigya to display the comments on that page. There might be a number of reasons for this:

1. There could be a routing problem between whoever your ISP is and gigya.com. I've observed intermittent routing problems myself trying to reach certain sites from my home; when I do a traceroute, it seems that Above.net, a major Internet traffic router, is having issues somewhere between Seattle and wherever I'm trying to get to.

2. The ISP may be blocking access to gigya.com for God knows what reason.

3.The servers at gigya.com may be sinkholing the connection, either from your dial-up IP address or from a whole range of IP addresses in that block, for God knows what reason. Maybe someone else who uses your dial-up provider tried DDoSing them or flooding some community they serve with spam or something, hard to say.

It's easy to see why they might block access from open proxies; spammers and Internet trolls use proxies to try to flood a lot of social media sites with spam comments. I bet your IP address from your dialup connection was just collateral damage in that ongoing war.

RE The culprit appears to be a number of connections to gigya.com.
I think that may be it.

RE Anyway, when the page refuses to load, it seems that it's choking on trying to contact gigya to display the comments on that page.
I noticed gigya.com among my cookies and then 'banned' it. I've just now 'banned' cdn.gigya.com to see it doing so changes the ability to download.
So far it's just churning.

EDIT:
It's been "transferring data" for the past 6+ minutes with a blank screen; stopping it still yields blank screen. So it's definitely a no go.