Why is a website down on one browser but working in another?

Joined
Apr 27, 2010
Messages
18,197
Location
Suburban Washington DC
I'm usually on Chrome and was on grainger.com earlier, but right now I just get,

This www.grainger.com page can’t be found​

No webpage was found for the web address:

HTTP ERROR 404

So I try it on Explorer, Edge, Firefox and Brave and see Grainger is working just fine. Lastly, I go to https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com and put in Grainger.com and they say Grainger is down. What's going on? If Grainger is working on other browsers, just not Chrome, why does
downforeveryoneorjustme.com say they are down when supposedly they also check all the other popular browsers?
 
This is what I have under extensions.

Untitled.jpg
 
Probably just a temporary problem on their end or routing, I can get Grainger fine right now with Chrome.

If/when downorjustme 'site shows something inconsistent, I open a command prompt and ping the domain. If I can get an IP #, can also ping that. In this case grainger.com resolves to 23.192.71.126
 
HTTP 404 means the server is reachable but it can't find (or won't send you) that page. And browsers aren't supposed to use their own DNS; they should use the DNS that your router says to use. So, mostly likely not a DNS issue. More likely, something in your browser's HTTP request (cookies, user-agent, etc.) is preventing the server from responding.
PS: one way to troubleshoot this is to connect from Chrome while in "private" mode. This will block most cookies, but it's not a definitive test as it doesn't block everything. If connecting from private mode works, then the problem is a bad cookie.
 
Last edited:
Typically this is due to an ad block type program. or your cookies aren't allowed through the browser. This is assuming that it's a broswer issue, in some cases, one would need to use a isitdownrightnow type services to check if their server is up.
 
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