Does Ning Crash Your Browser?
September 3, 2007I had given up on Ning several months ago when it suddenly started crashing my browser whenever I tried to access messages or friend requests. However, I thought I’d try again after seeing mention of the Building a Better Blog group and several others related to learning and education.
Unfortunately, things don’t seem to have improved at all. In Firefox 2.0, it completely crashes, leaving me with a blank white page under the title bar–no menu bar, no toolbars, nothing. I’ve tried letting it sit for several minutes, but I always end up having to shut the program down through the task manager. In IE6, sometimes I get nothing; sometimes if I wait long enough, I see just a “Loading…” screen that doesn’t actually load anything. I just tested IE7 and got to the Loading screen quickly, but then it just sits there indefinitely and I never see my friend requests. I even tried testing on Opera and Safari for Windows this morning; Safari shows the same page as IE does, and Opera crashes like Firefox.
I tried submitting a bug report through Ning’s site, but of course, that crashed too.
Is anyone else having these issues, or is it just me? If you’ve experienced any of this and have found a way around the problems, please share!
Update: Ning is working for me now in Firefox 3. If you’re on Firefox 2 and having problems, try upgrading to the new version.
Technorati Tags: socialnetworking, ning
My Ning won’t Sing! And I thought it was just me… I have been wanting to set up a Ning site for a professional development community, but no luck. The browser locks. The settings are not applied. I have an empty site which I cannot seem to interact with at all. Christy, since you’re famous and powerful, can you ask that nice Mr Andreesen to fix it please?
It is almost certainly your Flash player, which is launched by the chatroom application.
Try reinstalling Flash, and making sure you have the most recent version of Flash.
If that doesn’t work, uninstall Flash and Firefox. Make sure you remove the Firefox directory and any setting you can file (you’re trying to make Firefox reinstall its setting when you install it again - otherwise it will just pick up old settings from the previous install). Search for any files or directories called Firefox (if you want to save your bookmarks, export them to a separate file).
Then reinstall Firefox first, then Flash. If Firefox asks you whether you want to use old settings, say ‘no’.
Hah! Famous and powerful. Thanks for the chuckle.
I’m glad to know that it’s not just me though. Actually, I figured that at least some people might have similar issues, since browser freezing is one of only five troubleshooting FAQs.
Stephen, I think we were typing at the same time. I will definitely try that and see how it works.
Fingers crossed!
Hi Christy–did you try again with the browser? This is definitely a problem I want to fix, so let me know. If it’s the chat app, then I can look at removing it.
I didn’t do a full reinstall of Firefox because I haven’t taken the time to backup all my add-ons (including my bibliography info saved in Zotero). I tried in safe mode though, with a clean install of Flash.
It seems unlikely that my Firefox install would be the real source of the problem when I have the issues on multiple computers with multiple browsers and two different virus programs. It’s possible that the firewall on my router somehow interferes; I haven’t gone to the public library to try on their computers.
I can see the group just fine, Michele, so it isn’t anything there with the chat application. The problem is in accessing my friend requests and messages. Basically, I can lurk but not really actively participate or do any networking.
Hello Christie
I am also experiencing continuing and frustrating issues with Ning on two Mac (eMac and G4 laptop) computers at home. I can look, and lurk, but not post, and even this is intermittent, i.e., works very occasionally, and at other times, like right now, I can’t even log on. When attempting to upload a comment, I receive the ‘loading’ indicator and nothing happens. Very frustrating with no assistance from Ning right now except a cryptic note which referred to not having tested the platform on eMacs and something about ‘truncated URLs’.
I tried to join the Better Blog group and got as far as “loading” when it just stopped doing anything. I’m going to try Stephen’s suggestion of a clean install of Firefox hopefully sometime this week. The site itself just seems to have loads of errors though–check the Error Console in Firefox sometime.
Keep me updated if you figure out anything that fixes the problems!
Yep there are some definite issues with the code generated from the Ning site-setup server(s). This thing is not only a broswer killer, it’s a windows session killer too. There’s only so many times you can have your entire box lock up before you stop coming back. Too bad… great concept.