658891 - active URL does not immediately change when page fails to load

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[spamcollectionplate]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

Home page is set to "about:blank"
Links are set to open in a new window (as opposed to new tab)

When trying to load the above URL from a link that opens it in a new window, the message "Waiting for http://69.73..." [etc] shows up on the bottom of the screen, but the URL in the address bar remains "about:blank" and the Page Info display shows info for about:blank, not the page being loaded.

It may take several minutes for the request to time out, at which point the URL in the address bar changes and the "The connection was reset" error page comes up (with Page Info showing the expected URL)


Issue: until the error page comes up, it is impossible to retrieve the URL of the page being loaded until it actually times out - and in some cases it can take up to 10 minutes [unverified #] for that to happen
(in situations where right-clicks are disabled or the window is opened by a script, there is no source link to copy the address from)

Has been happening intermittently since FF 1.5 at least.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find a page which times out instead of loading
2. Open in New Window on a link to that page 


Actual Results:  
about:blank is displayed as the URL in the address bar and Page Info display

Expected Results:  
the URL of the page being loaded should be displayed as the URL in the address bar and Page Info display

Has been happening since at least FF 1.5 (no data about earlier versions)

This behavior is not caused by add-ons.

Comment 1

[spamcollectionplate]

(There is an old version of this bug raised here, but I can't edit it so posting a new one against FF 4.0 - this has been annoying me for years now!)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489984

Comment 2

[spamcollectionplate]

this also makes it impossible to reload the page, as this will simply reload about:blank and clobber the URL

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

This is intentional behavior: until the page loads the content being displayed is still the previous content, and there have been many cases in several different browsers where scammers take advantage of this to load intentionally broken URLs on the target domain in order to display phishing content.

If we're displaying "about:blank" in the location bar then there must be some content written by the opening page -- otherwise the location bar should be actually blank.