Firefox plus NordVPN breaks google.com DNS resolution

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/11575411

Firefox plus NordVPN breaks google.com DNS resolution - tchncs

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 [http://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 [http://google.de] or google.org [http://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 [http://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?

I was literally just going to post about this. I use NordVPN along with the desktop extension. When I try to navigate to google.com on any other browser, or even a FF profile that doesn’t have the extension enabled, it won’t connect.
See my update in the main post, please check if you also had split tunneling enabled. Still a weird behavior but now it is narrowed down to this feature.
I do have it enabled, both in the desktop app and in the browser add-on. However, it does work on my FF profile where I have both enabled. If I use another profile which doesn’t have the add-on, the domain won’t load. If I use another browser, the domain won’t load either. Lame.
I don’t think there is split tunneling in the browser add-on, not exactly sure what you mean.
You can use split tunneling for specific domains in the browser add-on.
Oh nice, I actually didn’t know that. Pretty nice feature.