FireFox sits on "Transferring data from..." or "Read...."

Question

Beloved smart folk of SO:

I'm building some functional tests for a web site using Selenium, and I'm stuck on a bizarre browser issue where the page never seems to finish loading. The status bar reads either "Transferring data from..." or "Read...".

Since the page never finishes loading, my selenium tests timeout.

The issue only seems to happen on FireFox. Our tests rely on FireFox *chrome to test file-uploads, so FireFox is crucial to our testing strategy.

I've checked both FireBug and Fiddler, but I don't see any incomplete long-running requests. All requests complete with normal response codes (no 404 errors).

What should I look at to address this issue?

• Doctype?
• Invalid Markup?
• Low level FireFox setting?
• Registry Hack?
• IIS setting?

Although fixing the issue for the planet would be awesome, I only really need to fix the issue for my tests.

If it helps, it's a .NET 3.5 solution built on MOSS and we're using Flash with sifr. Our markup is legacy (and it's a MOSS site) so it's a bit rough on the edges.

Answer 1

Try the Live HTTP Headers extension. With this extension you can grab the request and response headers off the wire. You might also try starting Firefox in safe mode for testing. This will disable all installed extensions. Run firefox -h in a dos box to see the command line switch for safe mode.

Answer 2

I am also facing the "Transfering data from.." issue on FF 3. It happens when I dynmically add a 'script' tag using the java script to load files from some other domain. HELP!

Answer 3

same prob, appears to be a bug. Some have said it's a 'security issue'. Did find a simple work-around. I havn't tried it, and most likely won't, cause I hate adding additional code for a single browser fix, but the approach looks good. See: http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=759308

Answer 4

Hate to answer my own question, but the problem went away on its own after developers started to strip out invalid markup, unclosed tables or TR's without tables are generally bad.

Answer 5

This is a known bug in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383811

If you you think the bug is relevant to your situation consider voting it up in bugzilla.