LearnBoost/socket.io-client — Issue #325: Firefox 7 won't establish websocket connections remotely
Author: mikolalysenko
Created: 2011-10-31 05:48:08+00:00
State: open

I'm not sure that it is necessarily an issue with socket.io, but I figure that I might as well post it here since it is relevant and perhaps someone here can figure out what is going on. Basically, I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Firefox 7.0.1. On my local machine, I can start up and connect to websockets just fine using both Firefox and Chrome, however when I push my code to my remote host (nodester in this case), the websocket fails to connect under Firefox. This is not an issue with Chrome, where the connection seems to work just fine. Also judging by my server logs, I am not alone in this issue as many other users seem to be experiencing similar problems.

Does anyone have some suggestions or possible ideas for what might be causing this? I tried using firebug and the web developer console on firefox to get some diagnostic information, but all I can find is the mostly unhelpful bit of debug spam:

--
[23:57:25.479] Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at ws://mmotest.nodester.com/socket.io/1/websocket/201746514214174909. @ http://mmotest.nodester.com/socket.io/socket.io.js:2294

When I turn on debug logging, socket.io says that the handshake is accepted, but then no further data is sent. What is very frustrating about this whole thing is that I cannot reproduce the error on my local machine. I am running socket.io 8.6 and the latest stable version of node on both the remote and local ends. I also tried tweaking the firefox setting "Allow http redirect for websockets", but it didn't seem to matter what value I set it to.

Does anyone have some suggestions for how I can go about trying to trouble shoot this without digging into the firefox source code and manually debugging it?