1544619 - HEAD request return contents that was cached from a previous GET request

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect, P2)

Description

[Dima Ryazanov]

Attachment: head.html

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

According to the docs, HEAD requests should not have a body, and if the server does return a body, it must be ignored: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Methods/HEAD

However, Firefox will incorrectly return a response body for a HEAD request if the contents of the URL has been cached from a prior GET request.

I'm attaching a test case; you can also access it at https://dimaryaz.s3.amazonaws.com/head.html

Open the console, then click "HEAD", "GET", "HEAD". The first HEAD will work correctly, while the second one will return a body.

Actual results:

HEAD returns contents

Expected results:

HEAD should not return contents

Comment 1

[Dima Ryazanov]

Real-life example of where this comes up: AWS SDK's "headObject" method tries to parse the response body as XML and fails (unless the file actually contains XML, which is usually not the case). Not sure why it's trying to parse it as XML - but it works fine when there is no response body.

Comment 2

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Reproduced comment 0 on 68.0a1 20190418221600, 67.0b11 20190415085659, 66.0.3 20190409155332 using Ubuntu 16.04/x64.

Comment 3

[Dima Ryazanov]

Attachment: head.html

Fix the DOCTYPE - not sure what happened there.

Comment 4

[Kershaw Chang [:kershaw]]

Attachment: Bug 1544619 - Ignore response body if method is HEAD or CONNECT

According to the spec, we should ignore the response body for the HEAD and CONNECT requests.

Comment 5

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

This should land early for 69, IMO.

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/0427669077f6
Ignore response body if method is HEAD or CONNECT r=mayhemer

Comment 7

[Dorel Luca [:dluca]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0427669077f6

Comment 8

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Hi, I managed to reproduce this issue in older versions of Firefox but this issue no longer occurs in Nightly 69.0a1 (2019-05-29).

Comment 9

[Dima Ryazanov]

Works for me in the nightly builds. Thanks everyone!

Comment 10

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Since this is a Wont fix in other versions I will updated the flags.