790779 - misleading error report on url redirection - url does not match error message

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Fabian Wenzel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1
Build ID: 20120905151427

Steps to reproduce:

I developed a web site whose index page redirects, via javascript, to another url for a screen-specific page.

EG, fabcc.de(/index.html) automatically loads fabcc.de/600/index.html for a vertical screen size for a screen 600 pixels high.


Actual results:

If fabcc.de/600/index.html does not exist, a file not found error is reported for fabcc.de,

that is, the url-bar still shows fabcc.de as the url that was not found.

This is VERY misleading. I would even say it sucks completely.


Expected results:

The url-bar should display the url that could not be found, that would be, in my example,

fabcc.de/600/index.html.

I hope you get the point.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I get a 404 if I load http://fabcc.de and the error message from the server is "The requested URL /640/index.html was not found on this server." and the URL bar shows http://fabcc.de/640/index.html as expected

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0 SeaMonkey/2.15a1
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0

Please test it again in the firefox safemode
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 2

[Fabian Wenzel]

I just tried it on a different machine and get the behaviour you described, i.e. a 404 Page, as one would expect.

Yesterday, I did not get a standard 404 page, but a styled dialog "Datei nicht gefunden" (file not found).

I wonder why sometimes a dialog is displayed, and sometimes a standard 404.

Is there any chance that firefox intercepts these messages for "user friendlyness"  (sometimes) ?

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You should not get a dialog for simple http errors.
There are afaik only some SSL/TLS exceptions that can trigger a dialog instead of an error page.

Do you have addons like firebug installed ?
I can only guess that this is addon related

Comment 4

[Tiziana Sellitto [:tiziana]]

This WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 ID:20130905180733 with a new clean profile.

Since it is passed a long time without having info from the reporter I'll close this in two weeks. 
Please update to a newer version and reopen this if the problem is still present.