Firefox suddenly start timing out when accessing secure site
We have a Java application running on Tomcat 7 on an Amazon Web Services EC2 server. The server is setup so that our application is the root application and is accessible from port 80. The application and Tomcat are configured with SSL so that whenever anyone types in the url for the site (e.g. www.something.net) Tomcat will switch into HTTPS and use port 8443. This all works fine, but it seems that if for some reason Firefox times out when accessing the site, it will never connect to the site again, and any further attempt to connect using www.something.net will show that the connection has timed out. Yet if you put in the port number (e.g., www.something.net:8443) it comes up right away. I tried clearing cached web content, setting the cache limit to zero, and clearing offline web content. None of this worked. Re-installing Firefox did work. We though the issue was confined to Firefox but we did run eventually run into it on Chrome also. On Chrome I was able to get the browser to connect to the site by going to Settings > Advanced > Clear Browser Data and clearing browser history, download history, cookies, and cached images and files. Once I did that the site came up immediately with www.something.net and switch to HTTPS as it is supposed to do. It took me several months to encounter this problem. But other users have encountered it right away (e.g., when setting up a new machine). Can anyone shed any light on this? I have seen some related questions, but none of them had anything that helped with my situation. Can anyone suggest a way of clearing whatever is preventing Firefox from connecting?
Chosen solution
Moving the SSL port from 8443 to 443 has solved the problem. It appears that when the url www.something.net is entered, Firefox remembers that this is an SSL site and automatically add the "s" to get https. In fact after the timeout the url line in the browser shows https:www.something.net. Obviously, this is defaulting to the standard SSL port (443), which does not work if 8443 is used. Moving the port to 443 solved the problem.
If you read about setting up Tomcat, the default SSL port is 8443. Maybe this is done for testing, but it never seems to be explained that there might be problems with 8443.
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The normal port for HTTPS is 443. I take it that this is specified to be loaded from a page? If the page is not specifying the alternate port for the item, that probably is the cause of the problem.
I have some more information. It seems that the problem is related to this thread: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/957292
The following from the thread got around the problem: "... remove all data stored in Firefox from a specific domain via "Forget About This Site" in the right-click context menu of an history entry ("History > Show All History" or "View > Sidebar > History") or via the about:permissions page."
But this doesn't explain why it happens and how to prevent it. I'm trying to switch Tomcat to use port 443 to see if that helps. I need a better solution. End users of our site are not that sophisticated and I don't want to tell them to forget about the site this when they hit the problem.
I have not seen that problem with Firefox myself. I have visited, for instance, https://addons.mozilla.org, but if I type www.mozilla.org into my address bar, the browser uses HTTP.
If your server is causing a problem with switching to HTTPS and switching ports when it is not supposed to be doing that, you should set it to use port 80, which is the normal port for HTTP.
Chosen Solution
Moving the SSL port from 8443 to 443 has solved the problem. It appears that when the url www.something.net is entered, Firefox remembers that this is an SSL site and automatically add the "s" to get https. In fact after the timeout the url line in the browser shows https:www.something.net. Obviously, this is defaulting to the standard SSL port (443), which does not work if 8443 is used. Moving the port to 443 solved the problem.
If you read about setting up Tomcat, the default SSL port is 8443. Maybe this is done for testing, but it never seems to be explained that there might be problems with 8443.
Modified by BLombardi