I had a problem with my MacBookPro the other day. It lost Internet connectivity. It couldn’t get an IP address from the DSL router. Restarting the router didn’t help. Nor did stopping and starting Airport or using a wired connection.
At first I figured the router was fried. But then, I restarted the Mac and lo! connectivity came back.
I wrote it off as a once off and didn’t think any more of it.
Then over the next few days I had problems with Firefox freezing. Uninstalling plugins didn’t help. What did fix it was closing all the tabs which contained Silverlight content.
Then the problem with the Mac losing Internet connectivity recurred. Several times. Both at the home office and outside of it.
I finally had an Aha! moment. I searched the hard drive for all occurrences of Silverlight, found the Silverlight plugin, deleted it and re-started the Mac.
I haven’t lost Internet connectivity since!
Has anyone else had this happen to them?
Do you see a pattern emerging here?
It screws with your experience of Firefox. It screws with your Mac.
It’s trying to get you to switch to Windows and IE. 🙂
I can’t say I’ve spotted it, but I don’t visit any Silverlight sights but I do have it installed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Silverlight was the cause of the Problem, especially considering all the Web Apps where built on Windows there are bound to be some cross platform issues.
Hmm, maybe this reveals the true purpose of Silverlight: to reduce the gap in stability and reliability between mac and windows:).
Actually, my firefox has been freezing a lot lately, and one of the latest changes I made to my macbook was to install silverlight. No probs with the internet connectivity, though. Weird.
Tom how is your Firefox doing? My computer is awash with alphas and betas and other letters of the greek alphabet now. On my PC My Firefox seems OK but IE7 had a wobble after MIX, spinning its wheels on occasion; now it seems to be back in action. I haven’t a clue what caused it – I didn’t do anything to resolve it (I wasn’t very scientific!)
As I transition between accounts it’s very useful to have 2 working browsers.
Firefox is fine now, as long as I don’t open any sites containing Silverlight content!!!
Has there been an IE7/Vista update since which may have caused/fixed the issue you were having?
Now you start to see why I’m generally running 4 different browsers!
Exactly – I remember that conversation in Cork and at the time I was thinking – whaaa?! When I’ve re-consoldated my life into one .NET Passport, one Yahoo account, one Google account, things should get simpler again. I hope.
There have been some Vista updates, perhaps something in there fixed it. Frustratingly, something also broke the NEF (Nikon RAW) codecs around the same time. I understand that they (Nikon/MSFT) are scrambling to resolve that now. Processing photos back here in Canada has been a nuisance though.