284388 - Web pages take very long time to load through proxy server

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Jeremy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: Firefox/1.0.1 and Firefox/1.0

Firefox takes a long time to display the websites when configured to run 
through our corporate proxy server. The proxy server is MailMarshall 6. The 
platforms I have tested on are Windows XP and 2000. The versions I have tested 
are 1.0 and 1.0.1. Firefox in 1.0 released the ability to pass through user 
name and passwords to network proxies for seamless web browsing. Typically a 
website will take 1-2 minutes loading. I can provide edited network traces. 

I then tested with IE and the browser performs as expected - loading webpages 
on demand. I am wondering if there is a problem with the NTLSSM Firefox 
integrated authentication. I do not have another NT based authentication proxy 
server to test the connections with. Firefox does not consume more than 30 
percent CPU at any given time. There is a lot of http traffic generated at 
intervals and what looks like reset connections.

In order for Firefox to be accepted in Corporate networks it must be 
compatible with all proxys.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Configure browser to point to NT authentication based proxy (Webmarshall) 
configured port 8080.
2. Try to browse webpage
3. Wait 2 minutes to load each page

Actual Results:  
Waited about 2 minutes for each page to load - page does eventually load.

Expected Results:  
Web page  should load right away. 

Network traces can be obtained on request. (IP addresses will be changed)

Samples of Network output: 
HTTP     HTTP/1.1 407 Proxy Access Denied (text/html)
HTTP     HTTP/1.1 407 Proxy Access Denied, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE

What I don't understand is why these messages show up in the trace but firefox 
doesn't stop trying/send an error message but keeps trying till it gets 
through.

Comment 1

[Brendan C. LeFebvre]

I can confirm similar behavior in Firefox 1.0.1 with my the sites specified in
my proxy server's proxy.pac. The proxy is a university server to allow access to
institutional journal subscriptions.

My experience differs from Ben's in that sites do not show up within 2 minutes.
In fact, they don't show up within 20, if at all.

Another difference is that I do sometimes get just a little bit of the page
before it enters limbo-- I've seen anywhere from one line to 16K.

Comment 2

[Brendan C. LeFebvre]

Am I to understand that not a single developer has encountered this bug yet?
It's the only thing keeping me from using Firefox exclusively.

Comment 3

[dguerrero]

This is the same as #284388, #257610 and #244918

Comment 4

[dguerrero]

Still happening in 1.5 Beta 1. 
This is preventing my organization to standarize on Firefox. 
Please, fix!

Comment 5

[dguerrero]

Other sites that previously started quickly have now begun to take long to load, for example Slashdot.org. The status bar shows a message about the browser waiting for google-analytics.com in most (if not all) of those sites.

Comment 6

[dguerrero]

A fix for WebMarshall proxy server:

- open "about:config" in the URL bar.
- search for "network.http.proxy.version"
- change it's value to 1.0

Rationale:
WebMarshall has problems handling HTTP 1.1 connections (enabling HTTP 1.1 in Internet Explorer results in similar behavior).

Comment 7

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Unfortunately, this is a problem with more than one proxy server. I don't believe this is Firefox's problem based on #6 - although, you may wish to open a separate bug for a feature request to expose the network.http.proxy.version preference in the UI.

Closing this as invalid since the issue is with the proxy server and not the browser.

Comment 8

[dguerrero]

Agreed.