376883 - want option to auto-retry connects where site is "not found" or "connection refused"

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[John David Galt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Firefox 2.0.4

On several machines I use to access the net, I get multiple occurrences of "404 not found" and/or "connection refused" before I'm able to get through to the page I want to load, even when I know it exists.  It happens more at busy times of the day or week and where either my own machine or the target is busy.
The cause is probably the fact that my machine "impatiently" gives up on getting a response from either a name server, the target site, or both.
While tips on making my machine more "patient" in these regards would help, sometimes I have to use a machine on which I don't have root access.  So it would alleviate a major annoyance if I could set the browser to silently retry each request until it completes, or until I manually kill the browser process.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Wouldn't that be a Denial-of-Service attack ? Webmasters would hate Firefox if this is possible.

It's not normal that you see this every time, you see to have general network problems. Currently, Gecko doesn't have a connect-timeout that you can modify, but you can do it on the OS-level (Well, if you have administrator access ofcourse) : bug 142326 comment 14.

Comment 2

[John David Galt]

It's not every time, just several times a day; and it's very normal for dialup users.  I'm tired of having problems handwaved away by people with the attitude, "<i>I've</i> got broadband, so let dialup users eat cake."

And of course a DOS attack is defined by intent.  A feature that stops repeating the request when it succeeds is perfectly valid.

Comment 3

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

This seems like something that an extension should do, and not really be part of the browser. However, this is a valid RFE, I don't see any dupes, so confirming.

See also bug 183122.