Connector not Interfacing with Firefox on Macintosh

fentonh

Apologies if this is nevertheless covered elsewhere, a search through the prior discussions was fruitless.

Background: I'm using Firefox 85.0.1 (macintosh) and the most recent version of the Big Sur system software. I mainly work with patents through GooglePatent or sometimes the USPTO.
Problem: the download options for both academic journals and patents is not working.
My Observations:
1. The icon for the add-on (i.e. article, book or patent) correctly appears.
2. When I try to create an entry, a menu appears with the following four options: "Save to Zotero (Google Patents)", "Save to Zotero (Embedded Metadata)", "Save to Zotero (Web page without snapshot)" and "Save to Zotero (Web page with snapshot)". It doesn't matter which I chose.....nothing is downloaded to my application.
3. The "Zotero Status" window reads "Zotero is currently unavailable", the "Update Status" button changes nothing.
4. The "Save to Zotero.org" option won't respond to the "authorize" command, i.e. I'm already in my on-line account.
5. The de-bugging page (e.g. reinstalling, restarting, turning off browser add-ons) did not resolve the issue.
6. The link to the pinging page reports back "connection to 127.0.0.1 failed. The system returned: (111) Connection refused"

Thanks

FH

dstillman

The link to the pinging page reports back "connection to 127.0.0.1 failed. The system returned: (111) Connection refused"

Either you don't have Zotero running or something non-standard on your system is blocking your browser's connection to Zotero. You'll need to troubleshooting this on your system as explained on the support page.

When I try to create an entry, a menu appears

No bearing on the above, but just to note, this isn't a correct description. You save something just by clicking the button, which doesn't open a menu. You have to right-click on the button to get the menu. (It's the same with any other browser extension button.)

dstillman

connection to 127.0.0.1 failed. The system returned: (111) Connection refused

@fentonh: This specific error sounds like it's coming from a proxy server, so as explained on the support page, your system is likely misconfigured not to exclude 127.0.0.1 from proxying. You can check and adjust that in your system proxy settings (System Preferences → Network → your active network device → Advanced → Proxies), unless you've overridden Firefox to use different proxy settings.

fentonh

Thanks. Turning on "Auto Proxy Discovery" the situation appears to have resolved the issue.
I had also been trying to use Safari to circumvent the issue, but was not able to do so. But with Firefox is sufficient.