Why Do Flickr and Firefox Hate Each Other So Much?

Why Do Flickr and Firefox Hate Each Other So Much?

For the past two years Firefox has had repeated trouble in loading Flickr images for me. I’m not sure why and I’d love to figure it out. Here are some clues.

1. I can load every flickr image in Safari, but not Firefox. What I get (especially when loading image intensive pages are random image loads like the screenshot above).

2. I only have this problem when browsing Flickr on DSL or broadband wifi. When I use my fiber uVerse connection at home all images load 100% of the time in Firefox.

3. It seems that once this behavior starts happening it progressively gets worse and worse. Sometimes if I close a page with images that are not loading, other pages that won’t load images suddenly populate the images.

4. If images are not loading in Firefox, Flickr thumbnails in FriendFeed also load sporadically.

5. I’m using Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7

I’m not blocking flickr in any way. (update edit: I don’t use adblock).

When I use Flickr’s test page, it has a red x for Global Farm 4 images. When I right click on both the images that are loading and not loading and check the image properties they appear to be coming from Global Farm 4.

Appreciate any help or feedback.