504309 - An img tag with empty src attribute triggers and extra request to the originating page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 444931

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Stefan Rusu]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5
Build Identifier: 

When a web page contains an img tag like this <img src="" alt="" /> Firefox 3.0.11 does an extra request to the originating page. This crashes AJAX web applications which use sessions/cookies for tracking some information which is automatically changed by this kind of request, thus making the tracking to be impossible.

I could reproduce it with Firefox 3.0.11 under the following platforms and architectures:
- Windows Vista and Windows XP (both 32-bit)
- Ubuntu 9.04 (i386), Ubuntu 8.04.3 (both i386 and amd64)
- Mac OS X Leopard (32-bit)

Firefox 3.5 isn't affected by this kind of behavior.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create a simple plain HTML page and make it accessible via a web server
2. place within that page a simple img tag with src=""
3. check the requests with the Firebug extension. It would show a couple of requests, both to the same page.
Actual Results:  
A couple of HTTP requests to the same page when requesting this type of pages.

Expected Results:  
A single request to that certain page.

If the src="" attribute is empty, then Firefox should do nothing.