Latest avast prevents IE & Firefox to work correctly

It all began last night when suddenly my browsers couldn’t reach some net addresses. I thought it was because of some updates I made that day, flash player and Firefox (upgraded to 26.0 version). After rulling that out , I thought it’s the browser itself so I uninstalled it and installed it again. No luck. I thought it’s maybe the internet connection. I talked with the provider and after checking I ruled that out, as well. Then I had the idea to disable avast. I use the avast freeware edition and , voila !!, the browsers worked ! I thought that avast was broken , so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it again. No luck as well. Although I can access some addresses, some I can’t (google.com, yahoo.com, youtube.com etc). So bottom line is that avast made an upgrade last night that prevents my browsers to reach certain addresses. I need some help, otherwise , after 15 years I will choose another freeware antivirus. How could those people from avast screw it up now after all these years ? Did anyone encounter my situation ? I wrote to avast support team and they didn’t answered yet.

Disable the Avast Online Security Extension in the browsers.

I did, it doesn’t help.

Open Avast, go to Settings, then click on ACTIVE PROTECTION. Disable the FIREWALL for 10 minutes and then go back to the sites. Bet they work.

The firewall is really problematic with Firefox, I intermittently have to disable it just to be able to access popular sites such as Pandora. Some days Pandora works, some days it doesn’t. If I disable for an hour, Pandora will often keep playing for hours, but sometimes, as soon as the firewall is back on after an hours, presto, Pandora can’t load the next song.

I even tried adding Pandora.com to the URL’s that are supposed to be ignored under Settings>>Web Shield settings (gear icon)>>Exclusions. Didn’t help.

The firewall really needs to be fixed, it’s too sensitive or something.

I have the avast freeware version. It doesn’t have firewall. And if you refer to the windows firewall it won’t work. This is not a problem for years, this happened after the last update , so your “formula” doesn’t work. And it’s not a day work , one doesn’t. It doesn’t work at all on those sites ever since, with both browsers, IE and Firefox!