Troubleshooting MSU Denver sites not loading in Firefox

Overview

If you are experiencing Mozilla Firefox not loading MSU Denver hosted websites (any site that ends in msudenver.edu), you may need to change some settings that causes errors with the way Firefox requests the website. Firefox has the option to use a service called DNS over HTTPS that routes website discovery traffic through a third party service securely. Sometimes, those third party services may not have the latest information about our website and lookups fail. We encourage you to try other browsers on your system such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Safari in these cases because these outages are usually temporary and DNS over HTTPS is a way to increase security on the web. However, there may be times where you need to turn it off to use Firefox.

Before you begin...

Ensure that Firefox is up to date and restart the browser if an update is pending. To check your update status,

1. Go to the three bar 'hamburger' menu in the upper right, choose 'Help', and then 'About'
   
   
    
2. You should then get the Firefox About page which will tell you if you need an update:
   
   
    
3. Restarting the browser should ensure Firefox is up to date.

Instructions

1. To change DNS over HTTPS, first click the three bar 'hamburger' menu icon in the upper right and choose 'Settings'
   
   
    
2. Type the letters 'dns' into the search bar in the upper right of the setting page to quickly get to the applicable section and click on 'Settings...'
   
   
    
3. Ensure the checkboxes for 'Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5' and 'Enable DNS over HTTPS' are unchecked:
   
   
    
4. Quit the browser and open it again to enable the change and try to access https://www.msudenver.edu again.

Result

This setting will bypass any third party lookup that Firefox enables by default and should let you connect to the MSU Denver site. If this does not solve your issue, you may be using an internet provider that is having issues talking to MSU Denver. We recommend you follow the steps in this article: How do I change my DNS settings?