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.
