90308 - PAC: notify user when PAC can't be loaded (bad url, etc)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Wout.Mertens]

When I try using file:///d:/proxy.pac as the URL for auto proxy configuration,
it does not work, and I get no error messages about it. This is the URL I
cut'n'pasted from the browser, which showed me the script. It works in IE.

Could be a platform-specific issue.

Comment 1

[Chase Tingley]

Hmm, so on Linux (200107010 cvs build) I can specify file:///scratch/test.pac
and things will work.  Is file:///d:/proxy.pac valid url syntax?  Can you try
using file:///d|/proxy.pac instead?

If nothing else, this can be an RFE for an alert when a bad PAC url is entered.  

Comment 2

[Wout.Mertens]

Success!

I got it to work with

file:///d:\proxy.pac

I don't know if this is a good URL or not. In any case, at least consider this
case as the RFE for better error reporting regarding PAC errors.

Comment 3

[Chase Tingley]

Wout, I'm glad you got it straightened out.  I'm updating severity, summary, etc
for the RFE.

Comment 4

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

serge, another pac bug.

Comment 5

[benc]

I've been testing PAC for two days now, and the lack of this error message is 
really annoying.

Comment 6

[basic]

*** Bug 111445 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[serge (gone)]

to default owner

Comment 8

[benc]

If you expect me (or anyone else) to do any serious amount of testing of this
feature, this is one of the first two or three things you should fix.

Without it, I have to sit around and watch a packet trace or my server logs
(which don't run in realtime and don't show negative hits anyhow) to know if
this worked.

Comment 9

[Samir Gehani]

Nav triage team: nsbeta1-

Comment 10

[Stephen P. Morse]

reassigning to darin at his suggestion.

Comment 11

[Darin Fisher]

future

Comment 12

[benc]

renomiating

Comment 13

[Jeff Hooker]

removed jhooker from cc: list

Comment 14

[Samir Gehani]

adt: nsbeta1-

Comment 15

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 225536 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Chuck Berg]

It seems that this bug is not likely to be fixed in the forseeable future.

Users expect that if user-submitted data is found to be invalid, or if a network
connection fails, an error will be reported. Since the bug here is that this is
not happening, perhaps a clear warning should be given instead.

'automatic proxy configuration URL:' should be changed to say 'automatic proxy
configuration URL. Warning: errors in loading the PAC file will not be reported
to the user. Use a packet sniffer to determine whether the PAC file was
successfully loaded.'

This would at least lessen the degree of confusion.

Comment 17

[Jeffrey Friedl]

Just a ping to hopefully bring this bug to someone's attention.
One would think it's be fairly easy to insert a "pac url not found" dialog,
and that's save the occational user (like me ;-) from pulling out what remaining
hair we have left....

Comment 18

[Darin Fisher]

It's tough because where I work, we have a PAC file that must be used when
connecting over the VPN.  However, when my laptop is not on the VPN, the PAC
file simply cannot be loaded.  It would be very annoying to me if I got an alert
dialog each time Firefox failed to load my PAC file because it's a very common
and okay occurance.  So, if we simply added an alert dialog, we'd have a
suboptimal solution.

What we really need is a smart way to deal with this bigger problem of PAC being
unfriendly to users.  There's the related problem of it not being easy to cause
Firefox to reload the PAC file (you have to dig through prefs to get there).  I
think it'd be cool if simple proxy selection UI showed up in the status bar (or
somewhere) whenever the user's prefs indicated something other than a direct
connection to the internet.  I believe there's an extension that does this,
called "switch proxy" or something like that.

Comment 19

[John Vandenberg]

*** Bug 275048 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[benc]

Darin: there are already long-standing RFE's for both multi-pac URL selectors and proxy profiles.

When a PAC file is selected by a user, we need to be fully committed to the usage of that file. 

Comment 22

[Peter 'vt100' Schwindt]

It's the year 2009 now, this bug hasn't seen any (real) changes for 4 year. Could we at least agree that FF not complaining about a broken PAC url is an error which should be dealt with (and therefor importance raised to normal)?

Comment 23

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

we're going to make it deterministic in a different bug about whether to fallback to DIRECT or block access entirely when this happens.. so notification is out of scope in either case