70084 - annoying browser warning (causes by hosts file): "connection refused when attempting to contact..."

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 43266

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[j13moh]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; 0.8) Gecko/20010215
BuildID:    2001021508

[Feature request] Whenever the browser tries to an advertisement site blocked by
my hosts file when loading some other site, there's a really annoying popup that
says "connection refused when attempting to contact www.advertisingsite.com"  I
want the option to turn this popup off in the preferences.  Sometimes I have to
press "ok" 20-30 times if I'm opening a lot of browser windows.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create/modify your c:\windows\hosts file and add the entry
"127.0.0.1     ad.doubleclick.net" without the quotes

Note that "hosts" is not a directory.  It's a file without an extension.  For
more info on hosts look at http://www.smartin-designs.com/

2. Go to the site www.epinions.com

3. Note that annoying warning messages from the browser pop up saying that it
was unable to contact ad.doubleclick.net.  These get very annoying after a while.

Actual Results:  User became very annoyed and wanted the ability to turn off
popup-warning messages.

Expected Results:  There should be an option in the preferences to prevent the
browser from popping up those messages, so that browsing can be more uninterrupted.

For more information in how "hosts" works, look at http://www.smartin-designs.com/

Comment 1

[HJ]

As a workaround, you might try to use a IP # of a fast webserver, then add that
entry in your hosts file, it looks like this:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx       ad.doubleclick.net (where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP #)

Note on NT the hosts file is located in: C:\WinNT\Systems32\Drivers\Etc\

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 43266 ***

Comment 3

[timeless]

vrfy dupe of bug 28586 [RFE] Should use error page, not dialog, for 
inaccessible pages (placeholder)

Comment 4

[Greg K.]

I'm not sure this is merely an enhancement. It may well be a bug.

For instance, let's say I access a given URL that has an <IMG
SRC="foo.com/image.png">. In my hosts file I map this to 127.0.0.1 for whatever
reason. I am, in fact, running an httpd on localhost on the default port, 80.
Mozilla still displays an error dialog that it can't find the host, foo.com.
I've tried mapping the domain name to another IP number that's also running an
httpd on port 80, with the same results.

Then again, why is this even an issue with Mozilla? Shouldn't the OS's TCP stack
handle the hosts parsing and simply pass the IP number on to Mozilla? Then all
you'd see is a broken image.

This bug, by the way, is Mac OS also, and perhaps All.

Comment 5

[timeless]

um. if you have a url http://kjshgkjfdhgkjfdhgkjfhg/infex.html and it fails to 
load, I would expect the error to list the original url, not some hosts or dns 
mangled url [i could have a dns server that resolves everything to 127.1, but 
so what? the page that failed to load 
was http://kjshgkjfdhgkjfdhgkjfhg/infex.html not http://127.1/infex.html]