Firefox help: I’am trying to get google earth to work but something is blocking it from it server i have firefox with Avira AntiVir And spybot . - Help.com

Umm. If you could send the report that it gives you when you try to connect, that may help.
Try typing it into google also.

I was having trouble getting google earth to work for our CIO on his vista machine behind our firewall, the error “We were unable to connect to the Google Earth servers to authenticate your account” kept popping up, even though I verified the hosts were reachable via the built in test app, and manual browsing.

After many hours of troubleshooting, and discovering that there are a LOT of posts out there with no solution to the problem, I thought I would share my findings on making google earth on vista work behind a corporate firewall.

If you go to googles support site, they say to make sure port 80 is open for the following hosts

kh.google.com
maps.google.com
auth.keyhole.com

Typically this isnt the problem, as everyone seems to be able to get to those locations successfully.

The problem that I discovered was that when google earth goes out to the internet it uses a user-agent similar to:

GoogleEarth/5.0.11337.1968(Windows;Microsoft Windows Vista (Service Pack 1);en;kml:2.2;client:Free;type:default)

Unfortunately most firewalls (such as Checkpoint Firewall-1) as well as many spyware/malware scanners are enabling protection against a malicious hotbar called ISTBar which used IST in its user agent header.

This meant my firewall was blocking any outbound web browsing if the user agent had vISTa in it, like the google earth app had. Once I discovered this, and changed the default protection for that hotbar I was able to get to google earth from behind my firewall using vista.

I hope this helps some folks out there :)