We use nothing but FireFox and Thunderbird. Like anything else new, they take a little getting used to and tweaking. The free extensions give you things that Explorer just wishes it had. And they are much more secure.
I can't think of a reason you can get cattletoday.com on one browser but not the other. Can you get
http://ranchers.net? It's on the same server.
Since you are getting a "Cannot Connect" the timeout might be set less on FireFox, but I would hope our server is not slow enough for that to be a problem. We're running a Dell server with Dual Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz Processors - Dual 73GB/SCSI/HDs - 2GB RAM connected to the Internet through 13 Gigabit Ethernet links from six separate backbone providers.
If anybody else is having connection problems, let me know!