andyBall - Thank you so much for the dialog on this issue. I think we have narrowed this down to my router and the openDNS parental control service.
NetGear partners with openDNS. You get a paid OpenDNS account, then the NetGear router downloads a custom generated blacklist/whitelist into the router. You manage the list on the OpenDNS website, then your router pulls down the list and runs the known blacklist/whitelist locally, and then DNS queries go through OpenDNS.
I whitelisted metrics.apple.com and apple.com and everything works in Safari. Remove the whitelist, and it does not work again. OpenDNS also has a bypass application that you can run on the local machine to register your Mac/IP address, and get direct access to the ISP’s DNS bypassing the Netgear routers’s OpenDNS.
It’s funny that all the iOS device in the house work fine on apple.com, all the Firefox installs on PC work fine on apple.com. I even tried changing my Safari user agent settings and still the website version I get from apple.com has these long obscure urls in the default click, but if you right click or turn off JavaScript everything is fine.
I can only assume Apple is serving up some form of website JavaScript to help with website tracking for guest to their website that is specialized for safari. It is most likely that this url link is soooo long it is breaking on my router when it is checking it’s black list, causing the router url check buffer to fail on the router???