1481736 - silent 3-minute timeout on startup when using an unreachable remote proxy

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking: Proxy, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20180626223325

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open http://localhost/ (or any other URL).
2. In the preferences, set "Restore previous session" and in the connection settings: "Automatic proxy configuration URL" with a remote URL that is unreachable and will give a typical 3-minute timeout.
3. Restart Firefox.


Actual results:

Firefox tries to open http://localhost/ but nothing occurs for 3 minutes.


Expected results:

One should get information on what is going on, ASAP. The reason is one can easily forget that the remote proxy one has been using for years suddenly no longer answers due to network issues, and the cause may be difficult to find[*]. For instance, instead of displaying a blank page, Firefox could display information on which server it is trying to connect to (including proxies), until the page starts to load.

[*] In my case, I had to use network debugging on startup:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Debugging/HTTP_logging

Comment 1

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Thanks for the report.

Managed to reproduce this issue on Ubuntu 16.04:

Fx 52.9.0 	20180621064021
Fx 61.0.2 	20180807170231
Fx 63.0a1  	20180813220525


For clarity, for the comment 0 STR, for the "Automatic proxy configuration URL" set something like http://badssl.com:12313/proxy.pac

It might be value to improving the general user experience on general connectivity issues, but on a wild guess this might be a rather big workload. Valentin, thoughts?

Let's move this issue on its proper component and set it as an enhancement until additional triage is done on it.

Comment 2

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

We might be able to add a pref to reduce the timeout.

Comment 3

[Divyansh Sharma [:spiro]]

Valentin

I am willing to take up this bug, if possible. If yes, can you give some initial headstart on where to look for resolution.

Thanks.

Comment 4

[Daniel Stenberg [:bagder]]

Related: bug 1243371 - where we've previously discussed shortening timeouts when connecting to proxies rather than "normal" sites.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

Moving bug to Core/Networking: Proxy.