Gmail: "Loading", can't reply or compose email, chat not working in Firefox? - possible solution

Is your Gmail stuck or hanging on "Loading…" in Firefox? Gmail chat not working either? The issue of Gmail freezing in Firefox seems fairly easy to find the solution to online, but given its huge annoyance factor here's step by step answers to help non-technical users to fix the problem.

The Firefox browser and Gmail don't always work well together. I've had previous experiences of Gmail being unusable for a while on Firefox after an upgrade to either, until the other caught up.

This particular problem seemed to persist however. (I used Internet Explorer or other browsers for Gmail, in the meantime.)

If you started getting this problem after upgrading Firefox recently (probably to version 3.6.12), one possible tip to solve the issue is this (it certainly worked for me!):

1. In Firefox, go to the address bar and type "about:config" without the quote marks and hit Enter.
   
   
2. You'll get the warning below, just click "I'll be careful.."
   
   
3. Now you'll get a window that looks something like this:
   
   
   
4. In the Filter box, type (again without the quotes) "dom.storage" and you'll see something like this; note the dom.storage enabled line which I've outlined in red:
   
   
   
5. Now doubleclick on the "dom.storage.enabled" line, outlined in red above, so that under the "Value" column it now reads "true", like so:
   
   
   
6. You can now close out of that tab, and try Gmail again.

If it still doesn't work I'm afraid the problem is something else and you'll have to try more troubleshooting. But it might well work - it has for lots of people.

Clearly Google are now using DOM storage for Gmail in Firefox - and you have no choice but to enable it if you want your Gmail to work properly. A stage on the way to full HTML 5, I suspect.

Tags: tip, trick, annoyance, problem, problems, troubleshooting, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience