It happens from time to time that websites are not available. This can have a lot of reasons, of which many are temporary. The web server can experience a bigger load than usually, it might be a configuration error, a web hoster problem, problems on the route to the server the website is hosted on or local Internet connection problems.
When Firefox users encounter a web page that is not loaded they see a simple error message that’s telling the user that Firefox encountered a problem loading the page, and that it was unable to connect to the page:
It offers three suggestions and a try again button.
Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at www.picanswers.com
- The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
- If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
- If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
Fierr is a new Firefox add-on that enhances the unable to connect error page. How? By adding additional features and options to it. The add-on will for instance count down from ten to zero and try to connect to the website that caused the error message.
Other options include a back button to go back in the history, a reload button to initiate a manual reload of the page and a search button to search for the site in Google’s search engine.
The search simply uses the domain name as the search term which may help for websites that are not overly popular, but not for popular websites. It takes little however to add keywords to the search, for instance “down” or “unable to connect” to limit the search results. It may also help to limit results to the most recent ones.
Fierr adds a few interesting options to Firefox’s unable to connect page. Is it worth installing? That depends, if you often encounter pages that cannot be loaded then you might want to install it, especially of those pages are only down for a short amount of time, and usually come back after a reload.
Fierr can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. The add-on is compatible with all versions of Firefox from 1.5 to the latest Firefox 4 builds.
