Q: After ISP change, cannot connect to some sites unless manually use https with url
This happened before, when I was house-sitting. I have a MacBook Air, and at home and other places, it worked fine. At their house (using Bright House internet) I would get what at the time were random problems accessing websites. I had Verizon Fios at home and worked fine there, worked fine at other places, too. The friends I was house-sitting for run Windows laptops and IE and had no connectivity issues.
Now, we JUST changed to Bright House to escape the Fios change to Frontier. And guess what?
Yep. Connectivity issues. For example, if I type in http://www.google.com it gives me an error, but if I use https://www.google.com it works. Some clicks to links from Facebook, for example. I click the external link in a Facebook post, it says the site doesn't exist. If I manually go into the browser bar and change it from http to https, it works. And sometimes, on some sites, pictures don't show up, where before they used to.
HOWEVER...at another friend's house where they are Bright House, but an older type of router, I have no connection problems at all.
Does this in Chrome AND in Safari. And apparently only on SOME Bright House network connections. My husband, running a new Win10 laptop with Firefox has NO problems.
So apparently, this is a configuration issue somewhere, but not sure where, or why. I know if I contact Bright House they probably can't help me, but I thought I'd try asking here first.
MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), Word for Mac 14.5.4
Posted on Apr 4, 2016 3:43 PM
I FINALLY figured it out, although I don't know WHY it's working.
I remembered that a couple of years ago, temporarily disabling Avast solved the problem. So after scouring my router settings and my Mac's network settings, I tried that.
It started working.
So started looking inside Avast and in the web shields, unticking the IPv6 setting fixed the problem (apparently). No, I don't know why it fixed it or why it's causing the problem. I dropped a note in the Avast user forum about it.
So if anyone else has this problem, either disable Avast, or change that setting in web shields. (I know it's a Mac, I STILL want an anti-virus program.)
Posted on Apr 7, 2016 7:45 AM