[http] Where can I find the default timeout settings for all browsers?

I'm looking for some kind of documentation that specifies how much time each browser (IE6/IE7/FF2/FF3, etc) will wait on a request before it just gives up and times out.

I haven't had any luck trying to get this.

Any pointers?

firstly I don't think there is just one solution to your problem....

As you know each browser is vastly differant.

But lets see if we can get any closer to the answer you need....

I think IE Might be easy...

Check this link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/181050

For Firefox try this:

Open Firefox, and in the address bar, type "about:config" (without quotes). From there, scroll down to the Network.http.keep-alive and make sure that is set to "true". If it is not, double click it, and it will go from false to true. Now, go one below that to network.http.keep-alive.timeout -- and change that number by double clicking it. if you put in, say, 500 there, you should be good. let us know if this helps at all

For Google Chrome (Tested on ver. 62)

I was trying to keep a socket connection alive from the google chrome's fetch API to a remote express server and found the request headers have to match Node.JS's native <net.socket> connection settings.

I set the headers object on my client-side script with the following options:

/* ----- */
head = new headers();
head.append("Connnection", "keep-alive")
head.append("Keep-Alive", `timeout=${1*60*5}`) //in seconds, not milliseconds
/* apply more definitions to the header */
fetch(url, {
    method: 'OPTIONS',
    credentials: "include",
    body: JSON.stringify(data),
    cors: 'cors',
    headers: head, //could be object literal too
    cache: 'default'
 })
 .then(response=>{
    ....
  }).catch(err=>{...});

And on my express server I setup my router as follows:

 router.head('absolute or regex', (request, response, next)=>{
  req.setTimeout(1000*60*5, ()=>{
     console.info("socket timed out");
   });
  console.info("Proceeding down the middleware chain link...\n\n");
  next();
 });

 /*Keep the socket alive by enabling it on the server, with an optional 
  delay on the last packet sent 
 */
server.on('connection', (socket)=>socket.setKeepAlive(true, 10))

WARNING

Please use common sense and make sure the users you're keeping the socket connection open to is validated and serialized. It works for Firefox as well, but it's really vulnerable if you keep the TCP connection open for longer than 5 minutes.

I'm not sure how some of the lesser known browsers operate, but I'll append to this answer with the Microsoft browser details as well.

I managed to find network.http.connect.timeout for much older versions of Mozilla:

This preference was one of several added to allow low-level tweaking of the HTTP networking code. After a portion of the same code was significantly rewritten in 2001, the preference ceased to have any effect (as noted in all.js as early as September 2001).

Currently, the timeout is determined by the system-level connection establishment timeout. Adding a way to configure this value is considered low-priority.

It would seem that network.http.connect.timeout hasn't done anything for some time.

I also saw references to network.http.request.timeout, so I did a Google search. The results include lots of links to people recommending that others include it in about:config in what appears to be a mistaken belief that it actually does something, since the same search turns up this about:config entries article:

Pref removed (unused). Previously: HTTP-specific network timeout. Default value is 120.

The same page includes additional information about network.http.connect.timeout:

Pref removed (unused). Previously: determines how long to wait for a response until registering a timeout. Default value is 30.

Disclaimer: The information on the MozillaZine Knowledge Base may be incorrect, incomplete or out-of-date.

After the last Firefox update we had the same session timeout issue and the following setting helped to resolve it.

We can control it with network.http.response.timeout parameter.

1. Open Firefox and type in ‘about:config’ in the address bar and press Enter.
2. Click on the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.
3. Type ‘timeout’ in the search box and network.http.response.timeout parameter will be displayed.
4. Double-click on the network.http.response.timeout parameter and enter the time value (it is in seconds) that you don't want your session not to timeout, in the box.