288149 - problem if firefox fails to retrieve a page

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[federico razzoli]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; it-IT; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050226 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; it-IT; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050226 Firefox/1.0.1

If Firefox fails to retrieve a page because network is too slow, SOMETIMES it
seems to remember that the site is unreachable. So, it happens that other
browsers are able to retrieve that page, but Firefox tells it can't just because
ONCE it wasn't unable to connect to that site. The only solution is to empty the
cache. BUT it doesn't happen always.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
It's hard to reproduce that bug, for me.
1. try to connect to a site
2. FAIL to connect to that site because of a timeout
3. retry to connect to that site and hope Firefox will reproduce the bug

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I saw something similar today with a 404. 

I tried to access a page, and it failed with a 404. I uploaded it to the server
and tried again, and it still failed. It took a lot of messing about to get
Firefox to read the page. Firefox 1.0 final, Linux Mandrake 10.0. I didn't have
livehttpheaders installed, so I couldn't see if it was a server problem or not.

Gerv

Comment 2

[Francesco Rizzi]

hmmm, this sounds familiar. Here's what I can contribute:

At home I have an ISP that tends to die.
So, sometimes, when I open Firefox, I get a white page for something like 30
seconds and then get an alert box that says it could not find www.yahoo.com (my
homepage).

It really can't get anywhere 'cause I don't have connection at that time :)
Anyway, under those conditions, if I try to close Firefox and re-open it, most
of the times I get the same white page for 30 secs and then the alert message.

*sometimes* though, and I'm sorry but I can't find a pattern that might explain
when/why this happens, I get the alert box *immediately* after re-opening
Firefox (well, maybe after 0.5 or 1 seconds.. still, nowhere close to the
'standard' 30 seconds or so I usually have to wait to get the message box).

So, not sure if this is related, nor if my specific case is a bug, but it might
give some extra info on how to replicate the issue described in this bug.

HTH

Comment 3

[Ben Barden]

(In reply to comment #2)

I'm using Firefox 1.5 RC2 (build date: 20051107) and this is more of a pain than it used to be. It's a lot worse in 1.5 than it was in 1.0.x thanks to the new error pages.

Now, if there's an error, one of the new Firefox error pages comes up immediately - there's no 30 second wait. I just got one of these when accessing Gmail. I hit refresh, Go, ctrl+refresh and so on, and the page wouldn't go away. However, when I tried it a few minutes later (having opened a new tab to get to Bugzilla, thereby NOT closing Firefox or clearing the cache), the problem had gone away.

Yesterday I was unable to access several sites (but not all) - and I managed to start surfing again by continually pressing Go until the web site finally tried to load. It took about 10 clicks of the Go button before this happened.

Comment 4

[Andre Klapper]

Can you please update to a recent version, create a fresh profile (see http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles for more information), and test this again? If you still see this problem, please add a comment to this report and tell us your version and your operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux). If the problem does not happen anymore, please set the status of this report to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME. Thanks for your help!

Comment 5

[Andre Klapper]

Unfortunately closing this report as no further information has been provided.

Please feel free to reopen this report if you can provide the information asked for and if this still happens in a recent and supported version. Thanks!