I normally don’t use Firefox very often but wanted to give it a try again. My usual default browser would be Vivaldi (which is unfortunately Chrome based). Anyway I usually have turned on my NordVPN system wide (Windows 10 Edu V. 22H2), which works fine on Vivaldi. I turns out it does have a weird side effect on Firefox. The DNS resolution for “google.com” just doesn’t work anymore. Any http request runs into a timeout. Strangely it works on any other google domain like google.de or google.org, also I couldn’t find any other domain to reproduce this behavior. Now this wouldn’t be such a big deal if google’s reCaptcha wouldn’t also be used by a lot of webpages and the api is hosted on google.com so basically the reCaptcha box just never appears and I’m stuck on those pages.

I tested it with v. 123.0 (64-bit), in private mode, in safe mode, FF portable 115.8.0 ESR and it is all the same strange behavior.

NordVPN also does have a FireFox Extension and using this extension everything works again.

Also tested it with the FF MacOS version and NordVPN client, here it works.

I can’t really explain this behavior other than some weird Firefox behavior together with NordVPN or some interaction with the Windows 10 vpn layer.

Can someone confirm this behavior on Windows? I assume other VPN providers like Mozilla VPN don’t have this?