1163981 - silent timeout; URL gives about:newtab or about:blank, which cannot be reloaded

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0
Build ID: 20150511122605

Steps to reproduce:

Paste http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=694852 in the address bar. Note: the machine bugs.ghostscript.com currently doesn't answer to ping; in the future, this URL should be changed to one with a similar problem.


Actual results:

After some time, the page loading stops. "View Page Info" says about:newtab (with the default profile, but it can also be about:blank if one has changed new tab configuration to that), and the page is not reloadable (to retry the connection). When Firefox is restarted, the tab is missing.


Expected results:

One should get a "Problem loading page" error message with a "Try again" button and the right URL in "View Page Info", like when the server is not found, e.g. http://foo.bar.invalid/

Comment 1

[porl]

Annoying.

At the URL

  wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:specification_drafts

Chromium eventually gives the message 'This web page is not available | ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT' with the option to 'Reload'.

If you paste the URL into the address bar, Firefox (after a long time) ignores it and writes the current URL back in the address bar. If you open the link in a new tab[1], Firefox gives you an empty tab as described by OP.

[1] eg from http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC39-M.htm

Comment 2

[jmb74]

Seeing similar behaviour in current beta/dev/nightly

Comment 4

[limkokhole]

Hi,

I'm not sure it's the related issue or not, so i posted here.

If you right click on a timeout link like "http://www.google.com:81"(got rare case it did shows) OR "http://10.255.255.1", then select "Open Link in New Window" OR "Open Link in Private Window", it will:

[1] Open the window with blank url bar.
[2] You can't refresh by F5.
[3] The bookmark can be star once, then become grey, and if you check in bookmark manager nothing actually bookmark. 

The expected behavior should shows URL, otherwise i have no idea which URL cause it(in case i clicked a lot of links).

Comment 5

[limkokhole]

Hi,

I also found if the click bookmarked URL from "Recently Bookmarked" OR "Library", if the URL timeout, then it will displays blank URL bar too.

Comment 6

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

I also see this from time to time. When a page doesn't load properly, the URL isn't kept in the URL bar, and you can't refresh the page. I think we should handle this somewhere in the UI code.

Comment 7

[Jan Tojnar]

I come across this issue on extremely low-speed Wi-Fi networks. It can cause a data loss when restarting Firefox and expecting it to open the tabs from the last time.

Comment 9

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

(In reply to Valentin Gosu [:valentin] from comment #6)
> I also see this from time to time. When a page doesn't load properly, the
> URL isn't kept in the URL bar, and you can't refresh the page. I think we
> should handle this somewhere in the UI code.

Yes, these are two issues. The specific network-related issue, and the higher level UI issue.

Bug 1395821 is for ensuring that, for whatever reason, any URL that's been loaded into a tab is never irrecoverably lost to the user.

Comment 10

[James Teow [:jteow]]

I've been loading urls that time out (including some of the links posted in this bug thread) in a New Window or New Tab, and I'm seeing them properly show a "Problem loading page" as the page title and the "Connection has timed out" message in the body. Importantly, I let them time out rather than stopped the loading.

Comment 11

[Vincent Lefevre]

Note that this bug is still present in FF 114.