411714 - Very large ETag header causes response to be ignored

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Marc Haberkorn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

I tried executing the same GET request three different ways: DOJO xhrGet() method, raw XHR object GET request, and standard address-bar URL entry, all using Firefox.   All three requests had the same problem - the response was ignored.  The Dojo xhrGet request said that the request had been cancelled.  

In all cases, I had a proxy between client and server, and could see that a 200 response code was sent to the browser, and that the response had content.  The strange thing was a very large ETag header (several thousand characters long).  I removed this header from the server's response, and the request was no longer ignored.  

I'm not sure what's happening under the covers in the browser, but I'm guessing that you don't want it to silently fail, but would rather either specify a useful error message stating what the problem was, or just handle it.  Safari and IE both worked fine.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

probably the 10K header limit