465202 - Clicking orange RSS feed button in the address bar fails to load RSS feed.

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 367432

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[amhoyle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

When the orange RSS feed button in the address is clicked, it should load the feed, however on many sites, the feed does not display and a "Page cannot be displayed" error warning page appears.  The problem seems to be the way Firefox detects rss feeds on a page. 

An example is at www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/cycling/cycling.htm

The following html code is placed in the page header and allows a feed to be displayed correctly when you click the orange feed button:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Cycling" href="feed://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/cycling/rss/cycling.xml" />

However, the correct code for inserting RSS feeds into a page, shown below (and which works in IE7), gives the error being reported:

 <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Cycling" href="http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/cycling/rss/cycling.xml" />

The orange feed button is not interpreting the feed correctly.







Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
A mozilla site can be used to illustrate the problem:

1. Go to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=feeds
2. Click the orange feed button.
3. The page cannot be displayed page occurs.

It does not just happen for this site.  There are problems with many sites like this that use RSS feeds such as www.bbc.co.uk
Actual Results:  
Page cannot be displayed error.

Expected Results:  
Feed should load according to default action for rss feed.

Comment 1

[amhoyle]

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/feedload.htm  Feed will load on this page in Firefox but not in IE7.  This uses incorrect syntax in the header.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/feednotload.htm  Feed will NOT load on this page in Firefox but will in IE7.  This uses the correct syntax in the header.

Comment 2

[Dave Garrett]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

The STR in comment 0 and both testcases in comment 1 all load fine for me.

Please try Firefox safe mode:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 3

[amhoyle]

I tried in safemode and the "Page cannot be displayed error" was returned in all cases where I said it would.

Comment 4

[Dave Garrett]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

I retested all 4 examples using Windows XP SP3 and everything works fine there, too. I don't have access to Vista, however.

Next thing to try is to check plugins:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Troubleshooting+plugins

And then test in a new profile:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+Profiles

Comment 5

[amhoyle]

Ok I tried in both Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 with new profiles and all plugins disabled.

When I load this link:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/feednotload.htm
and click the orange RSS logo in the address bar, the error page titles "The requested URL could not be retrieved" is returned.  The url in the address bar is feed://http//www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/rss/rss/test.xml which doesn't look valid to me.

When I go to this link:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/feedload.htm and click the orange RSS button in the address bar I get:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/rss/rss/test.xml in the address bar which is a valid link.

Two other things that may be important:

1. Under Tools>Options>Applications the Content Type "Webfeeds" is set to Preview in Firefox.

2. I connect to the internet via a proxy.  Under Tools>Options>Advanced>Network>Settings the option is set to Automatic proxy configuration URL.

Comment 6

[Dave Garrett]

I can copy/paste the following into the address bar and it works fine:
"feed://http//www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/rss/rss/test.xml"
redirects to http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hoylea/rss/rss/test.xml in the browser

The feed and rss protocols are secondary protocols with extra features. I don't know much about them myself, but here's what Google found:
http://www.brindys.com/winrss/feedformat.html

I have the same content setting, so unless there's something else strange here my guess would be the proxy is causing this. I don't know why offhand.

Comment 7

[amhoyle]

I'm going to check if other people with this connection get the same problem and will also raise this issue with our network support and see what they come up with.

Comment 8

[amhoyle]

Other people behind the proxy get the same problem, it appears this is an issue with accessing RSS feeds via a proxy server.  The support people suggested checking Bugzilla but only found the bug I created yesterday!  Hopefully other users who connect via proxies can generate the same problem and some sort of fix can be found.

Comment 9

[amhoyle]

Bug 465202 is similar to this Bug 367432.

The network support people suggested:

The Lancaster caches run Squid which provides access to http and https protocols, but not to this new invention of a 'feed' protocol.  My understanding is that Firefox should be rewriting a 'feed://http//foo.com/baz.xml' url to 'http://foo.com/baz.xml' and rendering it within the user's feed reader of choice.  It seems that this works ok for users not behind a proxy server, but not for users who do use a proxy server (Where it doesn't seem to decode the 'feed' url into the correct 'http' url).

Comment 11

[Tanner M. Young [:tmyoung]]

Verified Duplicate.