1064307 - [UX] Improve error pages using a ping service

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Expanding on an idea that Madhava pointed out:

Duckduckgo has this nice ping service where it will tell you if a certain host is up (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+mozilla.org+up).

We could use a service like that to improve our »Server not found« pages so that they are more specific:

- User can't reach site but the service can ping it: Probably a firewall issue
- User can't reach the site and neither can the service: Server down or address mistyped
- User can't reach site and can't reach ping service: Users connection might be down

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

See also bug 552992 for some previous thinking into this.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Noting because comment #0 doesn't make this explicit: from a privacy perspective, I believe this would need to involve user consent (ie, IMO we can't just chuck any old non-resolving hostname into the interwebs without checking if the user is OK with that), e.g. by having them click a button to check if the site is up, or involving an opt-in of sorts to automatically check it in future.