That has the appearance of an overlay. Usually a message would appear in front of the gray layer, I'm sure you've seen ones for subscribing to something or accepting some terms or whatnot. It's possible that Adblock Plus is peeling off the visible part of the overlay but leaving the gray layer. Next time you see it, try making an exception using the Adblock Plus button and reload the page and see whether you get a message on the overlay.

Hi jscher2000, thanks for the help. I'm afraid that isn't it. As I mentioned in my original message, I have already tried disabling adblock and all the other addons one by one and that didn0t solve the problem. As I wanted to reply to you, I typed Gmail in the search box and got the same greyed out results page. Then, to bypass that I typed www.gmail.com directly in the address bar and open my email to click on the link and come here to reply to you. I started typing this response and as I was doing so, read your reply one final time and went to test your proposal again. I opened another tab, typed google in the searchbox and funnily enough, this time round it didin't grey out. Tried again, typing Google again, and the same thing happened. No greyed out results page. So, it's something really weird. It seems to have stopped all on its own, because I didn't actually disable or create an exception to anything. Most strange...

Maybe it's related to my having signed in to email? Maybe google was expecting me to identify myself or something like that?

jscher2000 said

That has the appearance of an overlay. Usually a message would appear in front of the gray layer, I'm sure you've seen ones for subscribing to something or accepting some terms or whatnot. It's possible that Adblock Plus is peeling off the visible part of the overlay but leaving the gray layer. Next time you see it, try making an exception using the Adblock Plus button and reload the page and see whether you get a message on the overlay.

Hello again,

OK. So, as soon as I log off my gmail account, the problem comes back. I have tried to set an exception but I don't have that option. All I can do is toggle the "block ads" feature on or off. I have tried toggling it off and refreshing and even restarting firefox to no avail. But while I am loggued in to gmail, the problem disappears and while I am logged off, it comes back. So it seems like you are right in your estimation of what the problem might be, but not on how to solve it. Do you have any other ideas, please?

Many thanks

Hi Lovedj, since Google often conducts user interface experiments, clearing cache and Google cookies may continue to be necessary as you mentioned originally.

Do the problem results page have any particular pattern? I recall an odd issue in recent years with a large part of the results page being blocked by an overlay when results related to a currently playing movie. Google fixed that pretty quickly.

Meawhile, you could look at Startpage. They show results extracted from Google:

https://www.startpage.com/

(1) Clear Firefox's Cache

See: How to clear the Firefox cache

If you have a large hard drive, this might take a few minutes.

(2) Remove the site's cookies (save any pending work first). While viewing a page on the site, click the lock icon at the left end of the address bar. After a moment, a "Clear Cookies and Site Data" button should appear at the bottom. Go ahead and click that.

In the dialog that opens, you will see one or more matches to the current address so you can remove the site's cookies individually without affecting other sites.

Then try reloading the page. Does that help?

What element do you get selected if you right-click in the grayed window and open the Inspector via Inspect Element ?

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Tools/Page_Inspector/How_to/Examine_and_edit_HTML