383288 - Poor handling of download error pages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 320255

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Shad Sterling]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4

If I follow a download link and the server is too slow the page I am viewing is replaced with an error page.
Because of this I often choose to open download links in a new tab, which ends up empty if the download works.
If a download in a new tab fails, that tab will show the expected error page.
If I retry the download and it succeeds, it does so silently, leaving the error page, so I think it's failed again.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1. try to follow a download link in a new tab, with the server not responding
2. hit the 'try again' button when the server is responding
3.
Actual Results:  
I see the error message even after the error is resolved, so I end up downloading the file multiple times.

Expected Results:  
What I'd really like is for the error page to be replaced with an info page saying the download has started - maybe even providing an interface to the download manager.

handling for .torrent files is set to "save to disk," so it didn't ask.  "Show the downloads window when downloading a file" is checked, but somehow I didn't see it until after downloading 2 copies each of 2 (small) files which had this behavior.

Comment 1

[Shad Sterling]

Hmm.. I think what happened with the download manager is that it didn't appear until it began downloading a third file, which was not a .torrent file but a .iso file, for which I have no default handling set.

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

If you're curious, bug 364903 makes it so "Try Again" is unclickable after clicking it, which would help prevent multiple clicks if the page ends up as a download.