274025 - If-Modified-Since has a date in the wrong format (must not be localized)

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Miha Valencic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041110 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041110 Firefox/1.0

When requesting information, Firefox includes HTTP header If-Modified-Since.
This header has the wrong value which causes problems with most J2EE servers
(who call getDateHeader() method in Servlet API.

This is the FireFox request:
GET
/portal/binary/com.epicentric.contentmanagement.servlet.ContentDeliveryServlet/sample/images/foto_2.gif
HTTP/1.1
Host: d-brackoa.mobitel.si:7001
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.7.5)
Gecko/20041110 Firefox/1.0
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: JSESSIONID=B42Hk0hIus89ThbmW0inCLS56HMBKCLTNqsdId5VoRUdfISW2lBE!1063154115
If-Modified-Since: Sre, 1 dec 2004 12:56:40 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0

Please note the wrong value for If-Modified-Since header. It should be Wed, 1
dec 2004... instead of Sre (which is localized string).

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set regional settings to something non english (like German, French, Slovenian)
2. Make a request to some page, which does not prevent caching
3. Make another request (and observe what gets sent to it


Actual Results:  
Firefox sends the worng If-Modified-Since header.

Expected Results:  
Send the right date.  As described in RFC 1945.

This poses problems with many java servlet containers (such as Tomcat, BEA, etc)
when requesting information through servlets (

Comment 1

[Jean-Marc Desperrier]

What do you call changing the "Regional Setting" precisely ?

I'm not sure if you're talking about a FF setting (I see several related, but
none with that exact name) or an OS setting. 
If an OS setting, it probably has yet to be confirmed this is really OS=ALL.

Did you check with the suite ?

Comment 2

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

Miha: What Last-Modified date did the server send initially?

Comment 3

[Miha Valencic]

Regional settings of the host operating system (Windows 2000 in my case). I have
two locales available (slovenian and english). This error was confirmed with my
colleague who has german and english.

(In reply to comment #1)
> What do you call changing the "Regional Setting" precisely ?

Comment 4

[Miha Valencic]

Hey!

Right on!

The Last-Modified is in the wrong format as well.

Last-Modified: Sre, 1 dec 2004 12:56:40 GMT

And then, in the next request FF sends the If-Modified-Since with the same value.

Is this a bug? It is definitely on the J2ee side... What about ff? Should it
send the right date or no date at all (in case ff can not parse the returned date)?

Miha

(In reply to comment #2)
> Miha: What Last-Modified date did the server send initially?

Comment 5

[Jean-Marc Desperrier]

There was some mid-air collision between your comments and mine.

I tested with the french version of Firefox 1.0, under a french version of WinXP
(so the exact equivalent of the platform shown by your headers), with of course
the OS regional settings set to french, french as the preferred language,
everything french everywhere, and Live HTTP Headers stills shows me the
If-Modified-Since value sent is in english.

So at the end, I read the source :
http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviarybranch/source/netwerk/protocol/http/src/nsHttpChannel.cpp#1429
1430             val = mCachedResponseHead->PeekHeader(nsHttp::Last_Modified);
1431             if (val)
1432                 mRequestHead.SetHeader(nsHttp::If_Modified_Since,
1433                                        nsDependentCString(val));

FireFox does *not* create the value it sends inside If_Modified_Since, it only
copies the value it received inside Last_Modified.

Your script has sent an invalid value, this is what is sent back to your web server.

Closing INVALID.

Comment 6

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> And then, in the next request FF sends the If-Modified-Since with the same value.
> 
> Is this a bug?

No, it's not, see RFC 2616 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html) 14.25 Note 3:
"                                                       clients are
      advised to use the exact date string received in a previous Last-
      Modified header field whenever possible."

vrfy.

Comment 7

[Miha Valencic]

Guys,

thanks for your effort. I checked the RFC as well. 

Thanks,
  Miha.