The DD-WRT forum has some cargo cult tech support floating around on the topic of blank pages and the inability to update settings after a firmware upgrade. Many people are saying that you must use Internet Explorer to flash your router to DD-WRT, or else you will get a blank page (at apply.cgi) that does nothing when you try to apply settings, because it doesn’t like Firefox for some reason.
This is not true. The problem lies not in Firefox per se, but in the authentication mechanisms used to access the site. When you flash your router to DD-WRT, you will be prompted to change the username and password. Firefox (but apparently not IE) doesn’t like it when a site suddenly switches authentication regimes after having previously authenticated. (IE apparently handles the situation better. I don’t know the details since I have a Mac and I haven’t tried it with IE.)
The workaround is simple: in Firefox, just go to the Tools menu and click “Clear recent history…” Wipe out any active logins and cookies in the last hour (or however long it’s been since you started messing with DD-WRT), and it should work fine. (If you’re using the Web Developer plugin, you can do the same thing under “Miscellaneous -> Clear Private Data”.) Hit “refresh” on a page belonging to your DD-WRT router, and you should be prompted to log in again. After that, everything should work fine.
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March 17th, 2010 at 10:47 PM
Just flashed my linksys device with this software today. I too didn’t like the behaviour of a blank page.
Anyway I decided to use “private browsing mode” in firefox, rather than clearing the cache and it works perfectly.
April 6th, 2010 at 9:44 AM
Thanks for this bit of information – I encountered this issue a few months back, but after noticing that configuring it with a different router works, I didn’t think much of it.
I was configure two more routers today, and was quite surprised that there’s no actual explanation of the issue on the DD-WRT forums.
September 14th, 2010 at 8:18 AM
I would say that Firefox handles the authentication problem BETTER than IE. Firefox prevent strange behaviors while IE does not even realize there is one.
February 27th, 2011 at 3:42 PM
Thank you!! I just installed DD-WRT and was wondering, why I kept getting blank pages in Firefox while IE was working fine.
June 17th, 2011 at 8:59 PM
Thanks for posting this. It saved me a lot of swearing.