458580 - no resume possible of failed download in the default download manager if firefox presumes a successful download

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 237623

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[ray]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092510 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Firefox/3.0.3

Sometimes downloads fail (on flaky networks) but firefox marks them as finished and so the broken download cannot be restartet! 

2 Links (i am not affiliated with this, but it shows the age and the actuality)

2005: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/firefox-download-manager-is-broken/

2008: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/firefox-download-still-sucks-at-least-it-recovers/

Well, I can't see how it recovers if it already finished the download.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. download something (big?)
2. disrupt or pull the network link (?)
3. download gets marked as finished
Actual Results:  
The downloaded file is broken and incomplete.

Expected Results:  
No unfinished dl should get marked as finished. 0 Byte files never.. and a option to 'hard' restart a download or to check the integrity should be included.

Other Browsers got this issue also.. but that's their problem.

Comment 1

[ray]

If the download becomes a 410 status code (gone) then firefox might behave like this also. In this case the file finishes successfully at 0 Bytes. (does not even make sense)

Maybe someone could enable a retry download menu with an about:config option for the experienced users.

Comment 2

[Martin Sall]

I have noticed the same problem a long time ago on Firefox v1. I hoped it will be fixed in later versions but it is not.
I did a little experiment to try to reproduce the problem, I hope it will help someone:

1.I opened Netbeans download: http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html and took the download bundle marked with "All" (249 MB). I am pretty sure the download link is stable and does not change often, it is static and does not depend on any temporary sessions or smth. like that.

2.After a minute the download manager told that it has about 1.9 MB of 249 MB downloaded (see - DM gets the correct size when it begins!).

3.Then I disconnected the network cable from my router - I mean WAN cable (if I disconnect LAN cable from my PC to the router, download would be aborted with some error message box, and that is what I would like to see EVERY time when something goes wrong).

4.Wait 5 minutes (some random time). DM still acts as it is downloading, speed stays on the initial 24.5KB/sec).

5.I noticed that Skype icon turned grey - OK, enough for me - and reattached the WA cable to the router.

6.After a minute DM tells me - download complete, size 1.9MB. And no any error message!

So how DM may now think it is complete that DM clearly new form the very beginning that the size is 249 MB? It even did not do a simple size checking?

Comment 3

[Milan Jaros]

Great, I've found what I was searching for... I TOTALY agree.

Note, I have all the stuff and Firefox at the latest version (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; cs-CZ; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009020911 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.6).

Let's do following, please:
1. Start to download this: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=project-open&filename=project-open-VMware-3.3.2-1.zip&use_mirror=dfn
2. Press "Pause downloading".
3. Press "Continue". [Everything is ok.]
4. But try to disconnect from network (unplug cable). Why can't download go to the "Pause" state, heh? ;)

That's all. I hope you understand.

Usually I'm doing the same thing as Dale in this post (back-upping download continuously): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451953#c1

Comment 4

[HyperHacker]

Yeah, if you lose connection to the server at all, Firefox assumes the download completed successfully. So when you're on a flaky connection and you leave a lot of big downloads running overnight, you come back to a lot of corrupt files, no way to tell which actually downloaded successfully except to try to use them, and no way to redownload except to find them again. EXTREMELY annoying.

Comment 5

[Martin Sall]

Why is this still unconfirmed? I guess, we have told many examples how the problem can be reproduced. There is only one thing to note - if you try to disable network connection on your computer in Network Connections (on Windows) or disconnect a LAN cable, then Firefox may correctly detect the broken download and report error - so the problem detection on the computer works fine in Firefox.

To reproduce the problem more reliably (so Firefox do not detect that the problem is on your computer), you should disable connection somewhere else - to simulate problems at ISP/server end. For example, disable connection on your router, if you have one. Or put Firefox on some virtual machine and share your real internet connection and then disable it during a big download. If you try that, you'll see that the incorrect reporting "Download finished" happens almost for every interrupted download.

Comment 6

[Milan Jaros]

Maybe this should be posted to GNOME. I don't know. It seems that this bug has been lost here. :(

Comment 7

[HyperHacker]

I'd like to know how it's lasted this long. I don't remember a version that didn't have this problem. This from award-winning software?

At this very moment I am starting my 5th attempt to download a large file. The previous four attempts have all failed in this manner. The displayed file size simply changes from 205MB to as little as 1MB.