Solutions to try when few websites do not load in Ubuntu/Gnome

There could be many reasons why websites do not load in Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. There could be router issues and connection issues to proxy or any other user defined or network settings. It is very confusing and difficult to identify the cause and find a solution. In this post I am dealing with a special type of connection error when some websites load properly and some others have issues loading.

Like many other issues in Ubuntu, this issue started with an update. My connection was working perfectly but then after the update the connection became ever so slow (or so I thought). Some websites like Google was loading properly and without issues. But some other websites load partially and continue to load for ever and websites like linuxtoday.com and wordpress do not load at all.

There are three possible solutions which you could try out in this scenario.

1) Using a public free DNS servers like google DNS or openDNS. Its an easy fix in Ubuntu/Gnome.

See below the steps copied from Google:

In the System menu, click Preferences, then click Network Connections.

Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, select the Wired tab, then select your network interface in the list. It is usually called eth0.

To change the settings for a wireless connection, select the Wireless tab, then select the appropriate wireless network.

Click Edit, and in the window that appears, select the IPv4 Settings tab.

If the selected method is Automatic (DHCP), open the dropdown and select Automatic (DHCP) addresses only instead. If the method is set to something else, do not change it.

In the DNS servers field, enter the Google Public DNS IP addresses, separated by a space: 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

Click Apply to save the change. If you are prompted for a password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

Test that your setup is working correctly; see Testing your new settings below.

Repeat the procedure for additional network connections you want to change.

To use openDNS servers instead of Google servers, replace ‘8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4’ with 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220 in the DNS servers field as given in the steps above.

Ok, you tried that but it doesn’t work as in my case this time……

2) The second solution is far more simple.
a)In the System menu, click Preferences, then click Network Connections.
b)Select the connection for which you have trouble and click edit
c)Make sure that you have ‘Available to all users’ checkbox (at the bottom of the window) selected

3) A last solution is to make sure you have ipv6 disabled. To disable ipv6 in firefox do the following steps,

type about:config in the address field

then type ipv6 in the new filter: field

then double click on the one & only line that is left in the ff viewing window, to change it’s boolean value to true

Close firefox & restart it

Hope any of these solutions have worked for you. Please let me know if you have some other solutions