291486 - enhancement for pop-up message that appears when a website cannot be found

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Johan van Ruth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

I would like to suggest that the pop-up message that appears when a website
cannot be found is to be removed. Instead the message should appear in the same
way that Firefox lets the user know that a pop-up from a website has been
blocked (the yellow bar at the top of a webpage). This way the message does not
interfere when the user has continued browsing in another tab while the site is
loading.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Navigate to unavailable website.
2.Continue browsing in another tab while the unavailable website tries to load.
3.Suddenly a popup message appears to tell you that the website can't be found,
interfering with your current activity.



Expected Results:  
The notification about the website being unavailable should appear in the same
way as Firefox lets the user know that a website popup has been blocked, a
yellow bar at the top of the website.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 28586 ***

Comment 2

[Jason Bassford]

This is not a duplicate of 28586.  That bug is a tracking bug to have a Web page
showing the error. THIS bug is about having a completely different method of
notification of the error.

Comment 3

[Jason Bassford]

Johan: What do you want to happen here?  You're on Web site A and you click on a
link or enter a URL.  There's an error.  What happens?

I'm *assuming* that you want the original Web site (A) to remain, and you'd also
like the URL to revert back to what it had been before you'd tried to enter a
new one.  You'd also get the alert notification at the bottom of the browser
window as you would for a blocked popup.

What do you want to happen when you click on the notification?  Go to the error
Web page at that point?  In which case, this bug would depend on bug 28586 for
proper functionality.  Or do you want something different to happen when you
click on the error notification?

Comment 4

[Johan van Ruth]

Jason: For example when you have entered a url in the addressbar, Firefox starts
loading but the website can't be found because you have misspelled the url.
In case of an error-page the url in the addressbar gets overwritten (IE), in
case of a modal dialog popup the user is forced to take action before he can
continue browsing (Firefox). I came up with the idea of placing the notification
in the "yellow bar" because it has non of the disadvantages of the existing
notifications mentioned above.
I think the url should not revert back, this would hide a possible cause of the
error and Firefox should leave the oppertunity for the user to alter the url. At
least in the example mentioned above.
I think the notification should fit completely in the yellow bar, leaving an
error-page unnessesary. 

Comment 5

[Jason Bassford]

> I think the notification should fit completely in the yellow bar, leaving
> an error-page unnessesary. 

The only problem I have with this is that there won't be enough space in the
status bar notification to indicate WHY the Web page couldn't be reached.  It
could be an invalid URL, it could be network reset, it could be that it's not
accepting connections, it could be any number of things.  The only way to tell
(currently), and assuming that it's not something that would "normally" be
displayed, is with a popup or with an error page.  There simply won't be space
in the status bar to tell somebody why there's a problem, only that there is a
problem.  There has to be some method of determining what's going on...

Comment 6

[Johan van Ruth]

> The only problem I have with this is that there won't be enough space in the
> status bar notification to indicate WHY the Web page couldn't be reached.

For this a hyperlink to the error-page could be provided, the message in the
yellow bar would for example be:
Network connection failure error#???, click here for details.

Only a few errors are very common, so in most cases the user will know what to
do to fix the problem just by seeing the short description, because the error
has occurred in the past. 

I think the error-page should open in a new tab or popup window, or at least not
replacing the webpage that is currently visible.

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.