1611619 - Network error page messages are often too technical and/or wrong

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him; back Aug 12)]

Being on a train in the middle of rural Germany gave me a unique sampling of errors. Among them:

• "An error occurred during a connection to berlinallhandsjanuary2020.sched.com. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR" (I think this came from our NSS code). We should never put NSPR error codes in there, and should handle them gracefully. If anything, it should probably indicate that the connection was interrupted.
• https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d48b18fa27315206bf68d4dac82bc4e27a3f138e/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/overrides/netError.dtd#196 . This tells me to "inform the website owners". I mean, that's great, except Mozilla are the website owners and it's not their fault, it's a transmission error relating to the 4g-over-wifi connection used by the train and my laptop. :-)

I'll add more if I see other ones over the next 2.5 hours...

Comment 1

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

Yeah, PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR and some others are still quite badly worded, though I'm not sure we'll get to improving this in the near future. Maybe Meridel has some free time and wants to make suggestions. I think it should probably be more along the lines of "please try reloading the site and check your network connection. If your connection is fine, you might need to contact the website owner".

Comment 2

[Neha Kochar [:neha]]

Moving to Necko component.