351578 - "Connection to the server was reset" error page appears too early on slow Net connections.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 309332

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Alex Tanner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6

When trying to access webpages that contain a lot of data and take several minutes to load over a dialup connection, a "Connection reset by server" error page appears before they have finished loading. Clicking "Retry" allows pages to reload from the beginning more quickly, hopefully passing the "stuck" point, but this "feature" is a pain nonetheless.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install any Firefox browser from the 1.5 series on a computer with a dialup connection (don't know whether OS has any effect on this bug).
2. Try to access a complex webpage or site. Wait a couple of minutes.

Actual Results:  
"Connection Reset..." error appears as in the Details section.

Expected Results:  
Allow webpages to load within a reasonable timeout period as browsers of the Firefox 1.0 series used to.

I have looked at information on MozillaZine.org but it only told me to check my computer's firewall configuration. However, there is no firewall software installed on the test machine.

Ideally, there needs to be a way to optimize the browser for connection speed so that the timeouts for network errors can be set to reasonable amounts. Preferably this could be autodetected on browser first run and an option added for it in the "Tools->Options" dialog somewhere.

I have heard you can use a modded 'toolkit.jar' which in effect is the same as clicking "Retry" on the error page I mentioned. Not much use really. It just simulates the click but does not remove the problem.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Duplicate of / related to bug 309332 ?

Comment 2

[Alex Tanner]

Bug 216466 Comment 10 (Jesse Ruderman) seems to be related to this issue: -

"
> browser.xul.error_pages.enabled is annoying. 
> 
> If half the page is loaded and connection dies, it shows error page instead of
> half the page. 

I haven't hit that one.  What is the error message in the error page?  Do you
have a way to reproduce the bug?  Either way, file a bug and make it block bug
28586.
"

Adding CC and bug block

Comment 3

[Alex Tanner]

Bug 28586 Comment 314 and 315 may also be related...

"
------- Comment #314 From Jason Giglio  2005-12-05 09:29 PDT  [reply] -------

Just to throw in my 2 cents, 

"413 Request Entity Too Large" also returns "document contains no data"... I
had to break out the packet sniffer which gave me more useful messages than
firefox did.

For people uploading things to our web upload, if they are behind a bad proxy
it would be useful if they knew what the problem was, rather than such a
generic error.

------- Comment #315 From Jason Giglio 2005-12-05 09:36 PDT [reply] -------

To amend my message for Firefox 1.5, it now gives a generic error page "The
connection was reset"...  For 413 Request Entity Too Large.

Still leaves out useful information the server told you!  Not much better than
the old pop-up IMHO.
"

The rest of this bug may also be useful...

Comment 4

[Alex Tanner]

Confirming duplicate of 309332 and recommending resolution as per the first comment of that bug (i.e. alert is better than error page that replaces page that was trying to load)