271536 - firefox and thunderbird defaulting to allowing automated dial-up, hiding override

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Fred Douglis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

I installed firefox 1.0 and thunderbird 0.9 two nights ago.  I immediately
started experiencing problems with a pop-up window sporadically appearing (at
least every half hour or hour) and prompting me to dial up -- although I was
connected to a LAN.  I poked around bugzilla and found an "unconfirmed" bug
(255598) claiming certain pages caused a dialup window to pop up for firefox.  I
found only something asking for auto-dial for thunderbird.   I also found that
the IE option for "never dial" was getting magically reset to "dial if a
network connection isn't present".  

Eventually I found that by adding 
   user_pref("network.autodial-helper.enabled", false);
to user.js for both systems, the problem went away.

But I have a few comments:
1) Why should a system ever dial up if it has a valid network connection, even
if, say, a domain doesn't resolve?  It seems mozilla-suite is over-eager here.
2) Why wouldn't the system defaults be obeyed?
3) Most importantly, as a UI issue, if it's your app that is asking to
auto-dial, a simple check-box in that window to say "don't ask me again" is
natural and would have saved me a huge amount of pain and suffering.  

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. For me, I simply installed the two apps, and ran. It was quite consistent.
2.  Your mileage may vary.  In fact, it's hard to imagine this is default behavior! 

Actual Results:  
Until I modified the prefs, I got interrupted by the dialup dialog box, and the
apps were hanging.  

Expected Results:  
See above.

Comment 1

[Darin Fisher]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for the bug report.

This "feature" was implemented by an engineer back at Netscape a couple years
back.  It hasn't seen much attention recently.  From what I can tell, it seems
like there may be a discrepancy between the way older versions of Windows and
WinXP expose the system dialup settings (different registry keys, perhaps).

The dialog you are seeing is a system dialog.  When we get a network connection
or host lookup failure, we attempt to poke the system to see if a network
connection can be established, and if so we ask the OS to show the user the
various remote access dialogs.

In your registry, under the following key:

  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

Can you check the value of these items:

  EnableAutodial
  NoNetAutodial

Thanks!

Comment 2

[Fred Douglis]

(In reply to comment #1)

> 
> In your registry, under the following key:
> 
>   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
> 
> Can you check the value of these items:
> 
>   EnableAutodial
>   NoNetAutodial

Both are 1.  This is despite my repeated manual overrides in IE.  Something is
changing it, and I don't know what.  Could be spyware thinking it can use my
modem, but I looked carefully with ad-aware and Spybot S&D when this first
hit me. 

Comment 3

[Darin Fisher]

I don't think Mozilla has code to modify those registry settings.  In fact, it
only reads from them.  However, we do invoke Microsoft's RAS code, and I suppose
it is possible that that code could change the value of those registry keys. 
But, that all assumes that something set them to 1 in the first place.

Hmm... I'm not sure what to suggest :-/

Comment 4

[Fred Douglis]

I do :)

Both systems must use the same core, which has its own value to override the MS
registry value.  When I set those, the problem stopped.  So one thing I
certainly suggest is what I said in the 1st post: make it easier to set that
variable, in particular whenever you cause the popup to occur in the first
place.  A checkbox to dismiss and remember not to come back would solve the
problem.  Just add that user preference under the covers.

Thoughts?

Comment 5

[Darin Fisher]

Adding the checkbox is a great idea, but unfortunately we don't control the
dialog here.  I suppose we'd have to put up a separate dialog for the checkbox
or something.  At the very least, we should make it easy to turn off this
feature from the Firefox pref panel.

Comment 6

[benc]

Maybe we need to think about turning this off by default? The Netscape team
turned this on in Mozilla, and left it on, and shipped Netscape with this off,
because they could not justify the advantages, and they didn't want to fix the
related bus that happen when this is on by defualt.

Comment 7

[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 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.