288443 - Firefox refuses https connection when application is not located in /Applications or ~/Desktop

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Howard Fried]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

I created a folder an the same level as /Applications; I call this folder
Internet and it contains all manner of Internet applications (browsers, FTP
programs, etc).  If I put Firefox 1.0.x in this folder, Firefox works fine
_except_ it will not open any https URL (Connection refused... message pops up).
 However, if I put Firefox in /Applications or ~/Desktop, there is no problem
connecting to https sites.

No amount of fiddling with network or firewall settings will get Firefox to open
an https URL when it is in my Internet folder.  I have not tested it by putting
it elsewhere (I'm happy to have it work in /Applications).

This behavior does not occur with Mozilla 1.7.6

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Put Firefox in a folder at same level as /Application

Comment 1

[Paul Norman]

WORKSFORME with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.6)
Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2 on 10.3.8 in /Internet/ and /Applications/Internet/

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

Do you have an https:// URL in mind? 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288443 for instance?

I believe that Apple has said that some applications need to be in an
appropriate directory (on Mac OS X) to work properly, but I would
not have thought that this applied to Firefox.

'Connection refused' normally means that the server was not accepting
connections on the requested port (443 for example), and I don't quite
see how Firefox is causing that message, unless it is trying to
connect to the wrong port ...

Comment 3

[Howard Fried]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Do you have an https:// URL in mind? 
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288443 for instance?
> 
> I believe that Apple has said that some applications need to be in an
> appropriate directory (on Mac OS X) to work properly, but I would
> not have thought that this applied to Firefox.
> 
> 'Connection refused' normally means that the server was not accepting
> connections on the requested port (443 for example), and I don't quite
> see how Firefox is causing that message, unless it is trying to
> connect to the wrong port ...
> 

SORRY. SORRY. SORRY.  False alarm.  After playing with this for weeks and weeks
trying to figure out what's going on, I just now discovered that there is no
problem.  I use Little Snitch.  Somehow it became configured to deny https
connections by Firefox (only).  I don't know why it did that only in one
circumstance but not another and I'm truly embarrassed for not having checked
this previously.  Sorry.

Comment 4

[Wan-Teh Chang]

No problem.  Marked the bug invalid per comment 3.