Netscape 4.04 tries to GET https URL??

Please see if you can reproduce this problem, or tell me if it's something
already well-known.

Go visit http://www.c2.net/download/product/sh2/.%a0 Check some appropriate
radio buttons on the fill-in form, then click the "NEXT" button near the
bottom.  If you are running Netscape 4.x, you should get an error page from
your squid cache claiming it received an invalid request method.  But if you
back up, and click the "NEXT" button again, you do not get an error, but are
taken to the next page in the eval signup procedure.

This does not happen with IE4 or IE5.  They go straight to the next page in
the signup procedure without generating an error from squid.

After determining that this problem is reproducible, I turned on debugging
in squid, and found that the "NEXT" button submits the form data via GET,
and the response is a redirect to the https server at c2.net for the next
page in the sequence.  Netscape, upon encountering this redirect, issues a
GET instead of CONNECT to the https server!  This is certainly invalid! 
Squid is right, Netscape was wrong.  But mysteriously, backing up and trying
again succeeds.  Strange.

Can anyone reproduce this, and is this a known bug in Netscape, that it
tries to GET from a https server when responding to a redirect?  Somehow it
figures out the right thing to do when going back and forth through the
history, though...

Inquiring minds want to know.
Received on Thu May 27 1999 - 17:53:08 MDT