Firefox/Projects/Network Error Pages

Overview

Sprint lead: curtis
Sprinters: johnath, boriss

Description
More useful/helpful set of network error pages that offer tools helping users get to a useful end point via search, analysis of Places DB, or automatic redirects/reloads.

Status

  • Simple prototype which adds a search box to the default page. Still need to figure out if we can improve the utility by how we construct the search, and whether adding the search box makes sense in general, or if it only really makes sense for certain error types.

Steps

  1. Identify the 3 most important pages to improve.
  2. Pick one of the three pages.
  3. Improve it.
  4. Rinse and repeat.

Goals / Use Cases

tbd

Non Goals

tbd

Design

tbd

Bugs

Bug 479922 - Network error pages should give me tools instead of asking me questions

Reference

nsDocShell::DisplayLoadError -- dispatches various error pages

netError.xhtml

aboutCertError.js

about:neterror

about:config -- urlclassifier.alternate_error_page default string = "blocked" -- for example -- tells nsDocShell::DisplayLoadError to use the "blocked" page instead of the default generic page.

https://johnath.com/ -- triggers a "Secure Connection Failed" error page.

http://example.example.com/ -- triggers an "Address Not Found" error page.

Error Types

Which ones do we want to improve first?

  • Some "tools" may broadly apply -- change the generic template? (e.g. search)
  • No new pages, just make the existing pages better?
  • Add a search field to addressNotFound page.
  • neterror important???
  • protocolNotFound
  • fileNotFound
  • dnsNotFound important???
  • connectionFailure important???
  • netInterrupt
  • netTimeout important???
  • nssBadCert
  • nssFailure2
  • phishingBlocked
  • malwareBlocked
  • malformedURI
  • redirectLoop
  • unknownSocketType
  • netReset
  • netOffline
  • isprinting
  • deniedPortAccess
  • proxyResolveFailure
  • proxyConnectFailure
  • contentEncodingError
  • unsafeContentType

dnsNotFound error

URL that results in a dnsNotFound error page