579605 - autodetect proxy w/wpad.dat appears to have broken as of 3.6.6

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[L A Walsh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6

I have had this working for over a year here ... setting firefox to autodetect, and it corrrectly fetches a 'wpad.dat' from an internal http server from http://wpad/wpad.dat.  But this has stopped working.  I don't know exactly when it stopped -- it was working a few months ago.  But now it goes out to try to fetch content directly from the net (first thing my user hit was 'gmail.com', followed by 'google.com') and they get a 'fail'.

Monitoring with wireshark, I see no attempts at a fetch from 'wpad' for wpad.dat.
Trying it from his machine, I used 'wget "http://wpad/wpad.dat", and it pulled in the wpad.dat file just fine, but firefox makes no attempt to fetch wpad.dat -- it just does a DNS lookup for google, and then tries to make contact with it directly.

So...this used to work.  Has anything changed with wpad or proxy handling in firefox in recent versions ~past few months??

Workaround -- set proxy manually -- but affect my user who is a computer illiterate and such things are 'rocket science' (he's more into history...)



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Setup firefox to autodetect settings.
2. Monitor network stuff - notice firefox doesn't try to download wpad.dat from http://wpad...

3.
Actual Results:  
firefox tries direct connect (and fails  in my case)


Expected Results:  
expected it to autoconfigure as/per wpad.dat settings

worked a few months ago... think something changed in Firefox in the past few versions regarding wpad and/or proxy handling....

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Is this still a problem with Firefox 4beta8 ?

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

no response