192498 - web page that fails to load shouldn't change URL to about:blank

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 104778

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Declan Malone]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020623 Debian/1.0.0-0.woody.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020623 Debian/1.0.0-0.woody.1

I use dial-up on my computer, and tend to "click-ahead" a fair bit, opening up
new links that I'm interested in in a new tab. Because of the quality of my line
(lack of bandwidth, mainly, leading to timeouts), often I've got too many pages
open for the connection to handle. In Mozilla, for a while, before there's any
data downloaded for a page, the URL section is blank in the new tab. Then, as
more data comes in it changes to the URL of that page. Or, if the connection
times out before it gets a reply, the URL is changed to about:blank.

Why this behaviour is infuriating is that I don't know which page I was trying
to download actually failed. It means that I can't just go to the tab that
failed and hit reload, but have to go back to the original page and find the
right link again. If I've moved on to a different page, or killed the original
one, the problem is much worse, as I've got basically no chance of finding out
until all the other pages finish downloading and I can load up that page again.

I have no idea why this "feature" is in Mozilla. Perhaps the developers don't
see this as a problem because they've got broadband access. I don't. I'm stuck
with a <33kbps connection and this really gets in the way of me using Mozilla.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. limit bandwidth on your machine, or just disconnect net
2. open page with lots of links to external web sites, and open up each in a new
tab (or window; same thing)

Actual Results:  
new tabs that fail to load revert to showing "about:blank" as url, meaning that
I can't hit "reload" to get the page once the network traffic has subsided.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should have put the URL of the page in the URL box right from the start,
and not give me this about:blank nonsense.

Comment 1

[Alfonso Martinez]

In order to report bugs it would be better if you get a more recent build as
lots of problems have been fixed since 1.0
This one is still present, but has been reported lots of times.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 104778 ***