Comment 60 for bug 113201

I think I have been a victim of this bug for several months, using Firefox
on linux (currently Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0 running on Fedora Core 6).

When I work on this machine at home, using cable service provider, everything works fine most of the time.
But occasionally I use the the 'automatic proxy configuration option' to go via the proxy server at my university in order to gain access to research stuff on the web. For some web sites everything works, but a little more slowly.

Sometimes however, the delay is excessive, and then everything concerned with firefox freezes. I cannot change tabs, abort the lookup, or open a new window. Then either I have to wait until the web page is retrieved, or the lookup fails. That can take so long that I sometimes end up having to kill firefox, which can be a real pain, as it sometimes has has several windows and tabs open recording things I was doing.

If, as someone else said, Opera does not have this problem, then presumably it should be fixable in Firefox. I presume it means that all lookups have to be
done in such a way that other interactions are never blocked.

Sorry I can't help with debugging etc. I try to help with promoting FF,
but will have to be cautious about doing that while this bug persists
as it is disastrous.

Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs