The past few weeks, Firefox has been struggling to load certain pages, from some sources, such as the gov.uk MOT checking site and Facebook, plus probably other site I have yet to try to use. Other sites always load without issue.
What seems to happen is the URL is entered, Firefox goes through the usual motions of loading a page, everything shows the page has been successfully loaded, but the page itself is just blank white. Click refresh and sometimes it does properly load the contents, sometimes not.
Try another browser and the same pages load perfectly.
Yes, It cannot even be read by a screenreader, so the text is not actually there. Always a good plan to have more than one browser. I've heard good things about Brave, but here I have FF, Waterfox and Edge. You would be surprised at the difference between what you get on the same pages. In my case for example Edge makes Google meets usable, the other two have sub menus or clickable elements that fail to work for me in addition to the blank issue. I have also a suspicion that FFs add ons sometimes can cause these issues, as they are not made by MOzilla, so a tiny change in coding could easily give problems. Brian
That seems to have fixed it, but the MOT site is still not loading at full speed. It still shows up as if it has finished loading, but with a blank white page, then a few seconds later the content shows up. At least it works now.
That is probably because half the content is actually on some other server that is dead slow, and at some point in the past was so slow that it timed out so firefox stupidly cached a blank page...
Name: vcruntime140.dll <== Mozilla has this inside their installer, and put it here Size: 87888 bytes (85 KiB) SHA1: D247F5B9D4D3061E3D421E0E623595AA40D9493C
Maybe, somehow, the program is picking up a newer or patched version of that, from a place other than the Program Files area.
Try rebooting the computer, then retest Firefox first, before doing anything else. That's in case an automatic update had a hand in this.
Firefox comes in two versions, a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. Some people have "shards" of install material from one, which are no longer the active or useful one. You will find all sorts of messes on computers, depending on how long the OS has been in usage.
Mozilla even did a cheeky thing once, and put 64-bit executables in a 32-bit folder. It was part of some clever "transition plan" where they needs space to store stuff, and just decided a "dumpster is as good as any place".
In any case, view your C:\Program Files and your C:\Program Files (x86) and make sure one copy is working for you.
*******
On an unrelated note, when you see these in the Program Files
api-ms-win-crt-utility-l1-1-0.dll 19,136 bytes
that is a "re-director" DLL. It's not a real DLL and has no code in it. What it does, is map between routine names, so that the program finds the names suited to the situation.
It's another layer of DLL hell, when it isn't working right
The one in the Firefox folder, do not normally cause a problem.
It's some other (smaller) software companies, who don't know how to pack and install the right ones. I've even run into error messages, where the "missing" api-* DLL, simply does not exist on planet Earth. You can't find the name anywhere in search engines. And unless you can solve the problem, the program won't run without it.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.