662867 - redirect about:<nonsensical words> does not go to a "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded." dialog

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Attachment: screenshot

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv71; rv7.0a1) Gecko/20110608 Firefox/7.0a1 Fennec/7.0a1
Device: HTC Flyer
OS: Android 2.3

1. go to about:blasdfhgaf

Expected: dialog appears "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded."
Actual: 
Black blank page

Note:
1.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Desktop Firefox behaves the same.  In the implementation, any about:xxx page that is not found is just returned a NS_ERROR_MALFORMED_URI: "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded.", I doubt this would change.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/protocol/about/nsAboutProtocolHandler.cpp#191

Comment 2

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Sorry.  Typed title too fast.  It doesn't go to the dialog.  It goes to a black blank page.

Comment 3

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Tested/verified with bug 662785

Comment 4

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Reopening because this issue still exists (0613 Nightly w/ Gingerbread theme), albeit it's a little strange, and could use a verification if it's a Gingerbread theming issue.

To reproduce, open a new tab or on any existing tab with a URL that's non 'about:' go to about:123 - you should see a black page. For example, sitting on CNN.com, open 'about:123'.

If you are *already* on an about: page such as about:firefox, or about:home, heading to about:123 - you will see the dialog as expected. For example, sitting on about:firefox, open 'about:123'.

This bug should investigate the first case as to why a black page appears.

Comment 5

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to comment #4)

> This bug should investigate the first case as to why a black page appears.

about: pages are loaded into a local tab (non-e10s). An existing about: page is already in a local so all works well. An http:* page is loaded in a remote tab, so if we start loading an about:* page, we need to create a new local tab.

It seems that we are not closing the new tab when the about:* page fails to load. It also seems like we are not getting the dialog to display.

Comment 6

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Attachment: patch

This sisue only seemed to happen when we were launching from a remote page, creating a local page for the about: URI. I found that when trying to load the about:<silly> page, the system was acting like the remote context was still being used. I do not know why.

On a hunch, I added a simple setTimeout(..., 0) before loading the URI and this seemed to be enough to get the context handled correctly. With the patch we always get the error dialog. However, the orphaned tab remains. I don't have a great solution for cleaning it up, since the error happens fairly far from the beginning of the action.

Comment 7

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Ideas for cleaning up that orphaned tab:
* Let the exception escape Tab.create and catch it in Browser.addTab (this might not work as the setTimeout would surely mean Browser.addTab has finished)
* Add pseudo events for the Tab object, one of which would be "Error". Others could be "Create", "Destroy","Resurrect"

I am leaning toward the event for now

Comment 8

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

Backed out in http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/7c0f44b85272 as it's suspected to cause several perma oranges.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

Closing all opened bug in a graveyard component