236007 - Page takes many minutes to display when images fail to load

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Louis Kruger]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040220 Firefox/0.8

I see this problem often when using google cache to see a page when the original
server is unavailable.  The page will partly render, up until the point that
some images need to be loaded from the original site.  Then the page will just
sit there for a number of minutes.  Eventually, the image loads timeout and the
rest of the page is rendered, but that can take an unacceptably long time.

This happens reproducably when the site where the images are located isn't
responding to the TCP connections request.  Since the site isn't returning a
"connection refused", Mozilla just waits around in case it eventually responds.
 There's nothing wrong with that, but from a usability point of view, the rest
of the page really should be rendered without the images that are holding things
up.  If the image load continues in the background, and does eventually succeed,
the page could be re-rendered.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Visit given URL, which is a google cache URL of www.fvwm.org homepage
2.  To simulate conditions of bug report, www.fvwm.org needs to be not
responding to TCP connection requests.  (not connection refused, but simply
no response at all)  This could be simulated by using firewall or hosts file if
the site comes back up.

Actual Results:  
The google cache banner appears, the rest of the page with missing image symbols
appears 5 minutes later (I didn't time it, but 5 minutes seems about right.)

Expected Results:  
The page should render without the images much more quickly.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

I agree. The same problem appears with Mozilla 1.7. The text is however
available from the source code even if images are still being downloaded or
Mozilla is waiting for them.

In order to "improve" the page loading time, text should be displayed first and
images and Flash objects should be downloaded afterwards.

In many cases, we (=average user) are more interested in the text than in images
which are often just banners.

Worth condering!

Comment 2

[Frédéric Buclin]

wanted to say: worth considering!

Comment 3

[Nilson Cain]

Reporter: can you provide a new testcase in which you are seeing your problem?

Can you reproduce with Firefox 0.9 and a clean profile?

Comment 4

[Nile]

Perhaps this could be changed to an enhancement? Maybe have an option under
"Advanced" to allow the user to change the time firefox waits?

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 6

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20050927
Firefox/1.4 ID:2005092706

this still happens

setting NEW (FWIW)
multiple timeouts take way too much time

Comment 7

[Louis Kruger]

confirmed this still exists with firefox 2.0.  It's easy to reproduce even with original example.

To simulate the network failure, I map the hostname to a nonexistant host on my subnet to my hosts file (this step is unnecessary if the web server is down, but this simulation makes it easy to reproduce)

192.168.1.234   www.fvwm.org

Then, goto Google's cache for the website:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:9XeD67aW_6IJ:www.fvwm.org/+fvwm.org&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

Then see how slow the page load is.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

is this a pure server issue?

Comment 9

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Is this only an issue with Gecko browsers ?
Does it work if you disable the image loading in the Firefox options ?

Comment 10

[Emily Bowman]

Hi, this is an issue that's bugged me for years. Even if no images are on the page, it will still halt waiting for CSS or JS references to download until a timeout occurs. I'm not sure how to test with a non-Gecko browser.

Comment 11

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

closed due to great age.