GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 418917
Reports wrong error if proxy is down
Last modified: 2012-10-29 21:48:24 UTC
The bug has been opened on https://launchpad.net/bugs/90650 "Binary package hint: epiphany-browser If a (socks) proxy is set in the gnome proxy configuration but the proxy is unavailable, epiphany will report that the website dropped the connection instead of reporting that the proxy is unavailable. The easiest way to test this is to set an invalid socks proxy server."
Surely firefox behaves the same? Please research this on bmo.
what's bmo? Firefox does behave the same, but it gives an acceptably generic error. epiphany says "“www.example.org” dropped the connection." firefox says "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading." without appearing to assign blame anywhere.
bmo = bugzilla.mozilla.org. Does Epiphany have any way to know that the proxy is at fault? IMO, what matters is that the user is informed what went wrong and how he might fix it. I don't think either of the two messages approaches this goal.
I assume the error returned when trying to connect to the proxy's port is different from the one that the proxy returns when it can't connect to the server, though I can't say for sure (not familiar with the socks protocol details), or if that information is actually made available to Epiphany. I agree that it may be helpful if the user was informed what specifically went wrong, but I found Epiphany's error to be misleading rather than merely vague. I'd rather have a vague error telling me "the connection dropped" than having it point to the wrong place (at the web server).
This bug was reported against a version which is not supported any more. Developers are no longer working on this version so there will not be any bug fixes for it. Can you please check again if the issue you reported here still happens in a recent version of GNOME and update this report by adding a comment and adjusting the 'Version' field? Again thank you for reporting this and sorry that it could not be fixed for the version you originally used here. Without feedback this report will be closed as INCOMPLETE after 6 weeks.
A nice error page is now shown (3.4.1) in this case.