Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Feature Request: Support redirect to another IP address for load balancing

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by FredMcD

more options

Not sure if this is the right place to ask for this. But I'll give it a try: Many website owners and CDN providers want the web servers or proxy servers to be able to do load balancing. For example, when the server is overloaded, redirect the request to some other servers; or based on the client IP address, send the client to a server that can provide better performance. What they can use today is the 30X redirection. Which has many limitations: 1. breaks the cookie, if you 30x redirect to another hostname or IP address. 2. breaks https if you redirect to another IP address. We need another way of telling the client/browser to only change the IP address but keep everything else the same. I'm proposing a simple addition to the HTTP protocol: new status code, for example: 312 with 2 new headers: "x-redirect-ipv4" and "x-redirect-ipv6". When a server wants to redirect the client to a different IP for whatever reason, it just returns this status code with headers with the IPv4 or v6 addresses. When the client (Firefox in this case) receives this, it picks one of the returned IPs and makes exactly the same HTTP(S) request again to that IP.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask for this. But I'll give it a try: Many website owners and CDN providers want the web servers or proxy servers to be able to do load balancing. For example, when the server is overloaded, redirect the request to some other servers; or based on the client IP address, send the client to a server that can provide better performance. What they can use today is the 30X redirection. Which has many limitations: 1. breaks the cookie, if you 30x redirect to another hostname or IP address. 2. breaks https if you redirect to another IP address. We need another way of telling the client/browser to only change the IP address but keep everything else the same. I'm proposing a simple addition to the HTTP protocol: new status code, for example: 312 with 2 new headers: "x-redirect-ipv4" and "x-redirect-ipv6". When a server wants to redirect the client to a different IP for whatever reason, it just returns this status code with headers with the IPv4 or v6 addresses. When the client (Firefox in this case) receives this, it picks one of the returned IPs and makes exactly the same HTTP(S) request again to that IP.

All Replies (1)

more options

Hi,

The people who answer questions here, for the most part, are other Firefox users volunteering their time (like me), not Mozilla employees or Firefox developers.

If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues.