Ok, so all the behaviour shown below is without VPN, bear with me:
On a fresh boot, both https://www.aljazeera.com/ and http://www.aljazeera.com/ on both Purebrowser and Firefox don’t load:
Then I installed the Dilla browser and http://www.aljazeera.com/ gave me a DNS error, however https://www.aljazeera.com loaded in somewhat janky fashion:
Once Dilla loaded the https version, then Purebrowser and Firefox happily loaded both http and https versions of the site:
I tried rebooting several times and I would have to load https in Dilla 1st in order for PB and FF to load the page. Apart from one time, when I rebooted and it ‘restored’ the Purebrowser session, after which it loaded fine without the use of Dilla.
I had a look at my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 TLaptop
The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
and I noticed there were hosts.allow and hosts.deny files there too, but they only had # comments in them.
Now for the VPN stuff:
@Alex, my other devices can connect to aljazeera without a VPN.
It’s not just Aljazeera though, I’ve noticed other sites that are missing content without the use of VPN. For example (and there have been several sites, but I’m showing this because I remember), this is what the Adobe Flash Player download site looks like without VPN:
Whereas this is what it looks like if I pop the VPN ON:
I’m ok to keep browsing with the VPN on, but I bring it up because it’s annoying behaviour that shouldn’t be happening.