Safari on one Mac stops loading certain websites

[Robin]

Hi folks,

I hope you can help me untangle a puzzle that so far has me completely stumped. Here's what I've observed so far:

- not long after I set up our new RT-AC88U running Merlin (382.1_2), I noticed that Safari (and only Safari) on my MacBook Pro (not, mind you, my partner's MacBook Pro connected to the same network) would stop loading certain websites. Either requiring multiple refreshes to load a given page, or failing to load it altogether. Meanwhile, most websites continued to load perfectly well, and the troublesome websites would load perfectly well in Chrome.
- after following all the standard "fix safari" steps, such as clearing website data and caches, turning off DNS prefetching, and even rebooting the Mac, the behaviour continued.
- I decided to try turning off IPv6 on the router, and that appeared to fix the problem completely - everything was now loading just as quickly in Safari on my computer as other browsers and other computers. Great - annoying, but problem solved, I thought.
- this evening, my Safari started behaving the same way again. "Damn, not IPv6", I thought, so I went and turned it back on on the router. And presto: problem gone again. So it appears what is fixing this problem is nothing to do with IPv6 itself, but rather when I turn IPv6 on OR off, it causes the networking subsystem of the router to reset.

This leads me to conclude that there is some problematic interaction between Safari on my computer (running the latest High Sierra, in case it's relevant), and the networking subsystem of the AC88U/Merlin, which is actually causing a failure on the router. I'd really prefer not to have to keep resetting the router's networking to fix this problem. Any ideas where to look for further fault isolation? It would, of course, be wonderful if this could be isolated to a fixable bug in the merlin firmware, but so far I don't think I've got enough info to do that.

 

[dreba]

I got exactly the same problem. However I use a 4G USB modem for my internet and I heard it is an MTU problem. The only solution to my problem was to tunnel the traffic through VPN.


Skickat från min iPhone med Tapatalk

 

[yk101]

The fact that the issue only affects one computer suggests that the issue is there! Would you be able to create a secondary logon on that MBP? Logging on as a new user would eliminate the cache corruption as a possible cause.

 

[Robin]

I sort-of agree that the issue is with the computer, or at least, is triggered by it. However, the only way I've resolved the issue once it appears (so far) is to apply a change to the router which causes the router to reset its networking subsystem (toggling IPv6 in either direction has been successful). Rebooting the computer, clearing the browser cache, etc all have no effect. So there is a key part of the problem located within the router itself, even if it is only causing problems to one browser on one computer (at least, that we've identified so far). I will, however, try your idea of creating a second login and testing Safari under that login once the problem pops up again.