1226294 - Distinguish between "URI not found" and "URI not accessed because invalid"

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking, defect, P5)

Description

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Spun off from bug 733350, which is about IDNs which are rejected as invalid because labels contain mixed direction text. Examples are http://www.اast.fm/ (where "ا" is an Arabic Alef character) and http://www.מיץpetel.com

Quoting Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame) from bug 733350 comment #12:
> What I feel is rather misleading is that for these invalid examples, we show
> the same error page ("Firefox can't find the server at www.מיץpetel.com") as
> we'd show for a valid but nonexistent address. Would it be better if we
> showed something like "Firefox can't access the address www.מיץpetel.com
> because it uses an invalid domain name"?
> 
> A second question is whether we should transform invalid names to punycode
> (either in the address bar or the resulting error page), or simply leave
> them in their original form, given that we're refusing to do anything with
> them anyway. (My inclination, I think, would be to leave them unchanged. But
> I do think we need to tell the user the address is invalid, as opposed to
> simply inaccessible.)

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258