Google Translate stopped working
My home desktop (let's call it PC1) has been running Wheezy and firefox-esr
68.9.0esr-1~deb9u1. (I held back upgrades to firefox-esr for reasons I won't
go into.) A month or two ago, translate.google.com stopped working.
Normally, if I enter a phrase in the left window, a translation comes up in
the right. If I enter a phrase now, nothing happens. My desktop at work
(PC2) has the same Wheezy and firefox, and Google Translate works there.
I've had a couple of other browsing failures on PC1 (e.g. a captcha that
fails to display), but I'll stick to Google Translate as a simple example
that's easy to test.
I have found no way to succeed on PC1 and am mystified. I've tried modifying
the firefox configuration. I even replaced all of ~/.mozilla on PC1 with the
version from PC2, and it still failed. Ultimately I ran this:
apt-get remove firefox-esr
rm -rf ~/.mozilla
apt-get install firefox-esr
That gave me 78.8.0esr-1~deb9u1 with none of my preferences. It still failed.
So I'm thinking this is not a problem in firefox. Might it be a Java
problem? PC[12] both have the same versions of openjdk-8-jre,
openjdk-8-jre-headless, and ca-certificates-java. Beyond that I don't know
how to debug or fix this. I could of course upgrade the whole system to
Buster as a crapshoot, but I'd rather understand the problem. I'd be
grateful for any ideas to test. Thanks.
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