Where’s Google?

I turned on my computer this morning, fired up my browser and waited for my customized Google homepage to load. Nothing!

I entered www.google.com from the address line. Same story.

Two little applets, to calculate my AdSense revenue ($0.34 so far today) and check my Gmail inbox were both DOA.

What’s going on?

I normally use Firefox as my browser. I figured I’d see if Internet Explorer was suffering the same fate. It was not.

“Oh crap,” I thought to myself. “What has gone wrong with my machine?”

Luckily, the answer is nothing. It’s not my problem… well, of course it’s my problem. It’s just not my fault.

I found this on Bostonist.com:

We’ve gotten a number of field reports from users of Comcast’s cable Internet service across the state who are unable to connect to Gmail, Google, and Blogspot. One of our “Internet outage spotters” chronicled a tech support conversation he had in which the Comcast operator told him it was a Firefox issue and he’d have to switch to IE. Apparently Comcast won’t support Firefox as a browser.

Before leaving home I temporarily solved the problem by clearing my cookies, the tiny tracker files left by nearly every website. That’s not a good solution, because now I have to re-sign on to every site I visit.

Is this what they mean by Comcastic?

5 thoughts on “Where’s Google?”

  1. Geoff,

    As I’ve told you in the past, I had comcast in Middletown which was horrible. I came back to DSL about 2 months ago. We have 6 machines running on one DSL line including 3 laptops w/wireless cards and have no problems compared to my single machine that I was running on comcast.

  2. the information about comcast not supporting firfox is a bit misinterpreted. Comcast will only support the software it distributes to it’s clients, and they distribute a comcast branded version of IE, not firefox. This is no different than when AT&T (at the time they were SBC) was distributing and SBC/Yahoo branded version of IE. Their customer support wont touch firefox. Same with AOL, and most any other ISP. The firefox problem had nothing to do with Comcast, as they just function as an ISP. The problem had to do with DNS servers that firefox was unable to handle properly. This was a Google based mix up, and nothing more.

    I can’t believe I’m defending Comcast on this, but there you have it.

  3. This is one of the many reasons why in our household, the cable company is called “Comcrap”.

    Back before I switched to EFT payments, I actually wrote the checks out to “Comcrap Cable”. All were cashed without delay.

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