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How do I make Firefox produce more detailed diagnostics?

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  • Posljednji odgovor poslao TyDraniu

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Is there a way to enable more detailed diagnostics from Firefox for Android when it is unable to connect to a web site?

When I use Firefox for Android to test a web site that I'm developing locally (which is very likely broken), it displays a page reading in part "Unable to connect" and "Firefox can't establish a connection".

Unfortunately this is insufficiently detailed to be useful in root-causing the problem. There are many possible reasons why Firefox can be unable to connect to a given address, including (but not limited to) no route to that host, connection refused, or connection timed out.

Further down the page are some potential workarounds, but since the user is given no information as to what actually went wrong, she is unable to tell whether the suggested actions are useful or not. Any (or even all) of them could be a waste of the user's time.

I am hoping for diagnostics of the form: "Unable to connect

Firefox can't establish a connection to ${HOST}:${PORT} because ${REASON}. Error code: ${ERRCODE}. " ...where ERRCODE is an errno value on UNIX or a WSAGetLastError() value on Windows, and ${REASON} is a human-readable description of that error code. Note how detailed, specific and therefore actionable this information is.

I vaguely recall that an earlier version of Firefox produced much more useful error pages in the past, so this seems to me to be a regression.

My desktop Firefox, by contrast, reports: "The connection has timed out

The server at 172.16.1.0 is taking too long to respond."

This is great - from this I can tell that Firefox encountered an ETIMEDOUT, which is useful in root-causing the fault.

I suspect that I've configured my desktop Firefox to produce more useful diagnostics, failed to make the same change on mobile, and forgotten what I did on desktop, hence this plaintive question.

Is there a way to enable more detailed diagnostics from Firefox for Android when it is unable to connect to a web site? When I use Firefox for Android to test a web site that I'm developing locally (which is very likely broken), it displays a page reading in part "Unable to connect" and "Firefox can't establish a connection". Unfortunately this is insufficiently detailed to be useful in root-causing the problem. There are many possible reasons why Firefox can be unable to connect to a given address, including (but not limited to) no route to that host, connection refused, or connection timed out. Further down the page are some potential workarounds, but since the user is given no information as to what actually went wrong, she is unable to tell whether the suggested actions are useful or not. Any (or even all) of them could be a waste of the user's time. I am hoping for diagnostics of the form: "Unable to connect Firefox can't establish a connection to ${HOST}:${PORT} because ${REASON}. Error code: ${ERRCODE}. " ...where ERRCODE is an errno value on UNIX or a WSAGetLastError() value on Windows, and ${REASON} is a human-readable description of that error code. Note how detailed, specific and therefore actionable this information is. I vaguely recall that an earlier version of Firefox produced much more useful error pages in the past, so this seems to me to be a regression. My desktop Firefox, by contrast, reports: "The connection has timed out The server at 172.16.1.0 is taking too long to respond." This is great - from this I can tell that Firefox encountered an ETIMEDOUT, which is useful in root-causing the fault. I suspect that I've configured my desktop Firefox to produce more useful diagnostics, failed to make the same change on mobile, and forgotten what I did on desktop, hence this plaintive question.

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You can use the Firefox developer tools on your desktop to debug Web sites and Web apps running in other browsers or runtimes. The other browser might be on the same device as the tools themselves or on a different device, such as a phone connected over USB.

You can connect the developer tools to Gecko-based runtimes like Firefox Desktop, Firefox for Android and Thunderbird.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugging/Debugging_Firefox_for_Android_with_WebIDE

You can now connect to remote tabs on devices (set devtools.aboutdebugging.new-enabled to true, install the ADB extension, connect your phone, open about:debugging).