Firefox 2: little hack to auto reload timed out connections

by whlooi | Filed under BSL5.com, Browser, General, Interesting, KeyEll(Kuala Lumpur), Networking.

This post was published with my N95.

This little hack could be useful if a website is busy and you do not want sit and manually refresh the page, Firefox will show you “connection time out” page, but will try automatically reload it until site respond.

The original hack can be found at http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~ryross/ however, I think the file is outdated. Unfortunately the author did not provide any details on what was changed in that file and I could not find any other details or other method to do this.
I found only one extra line needed to be added in the original file to get the same effect.

1) close Firefox
2) locate and backup C:\Program Files\Firefox\chrome\toolkit.jar (assuming your Firefox is in C:\Program Files\Firefox)
3) using WinRAR (or other archiver) find and extract from toolkit.jar: content\global\netError.xhtml
4) open netError.xhtml with a text editor
5) find the code

var title = document.getElementById(”errorTitleText”);

6) above that line insert this line:

if(err==”netTimeout” || err==”connectionFailure” || err==”netReset”) location.reload();

7) save the file (make sure the filename and extension was not changed)
using WinRAR replace content\global\netError.xhtml inside toolkit.jar with the modified netError.xhtml