HTTP 414 Request-URI Too Large and Firefox

On May 30, 2008, in Browsers, by Anuj Gakhar

I have been struggling with this weird browser issue for the past day or so now. If I open any website off one of the IIS servers here, it brings up the following weird error (only in Firefox).

HTTP 414 Request-URI Too Large – The size of the request header is too large. Contact your ISA server administrator. (12215)
Internet Security and Acceleration Server

The same webpage worked fine in IE. So I was puzzled for a while and searching on Google revealed that probably a hotfix is required for IIS? But then, I thought I should be getting the same error in IE as well if that was the case, so its got to do something with Firefox surely.

After a bit of asking around, it turns out that the simple resolution is to just delete the cookies from Firefox and that should do it. And after deleting my cookies, the error was gone. Looks like Firefox is sending the cookies in the header? Not sure really but I thought someone could benefit from this post.

Anyone else had the same issue ?

 

12 Responses to HTTP 414 Request-URI Too Large and Firefox

  1. Barny says:

    Firefox should be sending cookies in the header, as part of every request. It could be that the app you’re accessing has set enough data in cookies that IIS is rejecting the request because the total request size is too large.
    The other thing that could be a factor is that if you’re setting domain-wide cookies and have many apps on the one domain, you’ll be sending the cookies for the whole domain, which could bulk up the number of cookies a lot.
    If it happens again, you could get FireBug or Fiddler (www.fiddlertool.com) and watch what is being sent with each request.

    Barny

  2. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @barny, I understand Firefox would be sending cookies. but wouldnt IE do that as well then ? And your right, there are too many sites setup on the IIS and possibly the size of the cookies got large but then again, why only Firefox ?

  3. Barny says:

    Why FireFox? It could be that you’d used FF to visit more of the sites that set cookies on the same domain, so FF had more cookies. Or it could be that FF sends all relavent cookies, even if that makes the request too large, whereas IE stops sending cookies where there are too many/too large? This page seems to suggest that FF will remember more than IE: http://krijnhoetmer.nl/stuff/javascript/maximum-cookies/

    Barny

  4. Anuj Gakhar says:

    That would explain it. Good to know. Thanks Barny.

  5. Richard Taylor says:

    I have a customer with the same problem and I already stumbled on the solution of deleting the cookies to get back to the website. However, I was wondering if there was a fix other than setting FF to delete private data when exiting. My customer has my.aol.com set as their home page and that is the site with the offending cookie. So, when they open FF, they get the error message and being a novice, think that their browser is broken and they can’t get anywhere on the Internet. Any thoughts?

    -Richard

  6. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Richard, I have had this problem a few times now and the only thing I do is to delete my cookies. I am not sure if there is anything else that can be done to solve this.

  7. I, too, have had this pesky problem. Not being very computer literate, I did not know how to cure the problem. I have been searching in an effort to find something I can understand. Stumbling upon this website, I find others are having the same problem. In simple, layman terms, can someone tell me how to outfox what Fox seems to handing me?

  8. nick Procyk says:

    I had the same problem but got round it by allowing the specific cookies from google. I installed ( and deinstalled ) the add-on “cookieculler” which disallowed Google to set cookies. Just add mail.google.com to the allowed websites

  9. mojiz rizvi says:

    sir
    when i open my google a/c it shows that
    uri too large pls help me

  10. mojiz rizvi says:

    pls help me
    when i open my a/c itshows that uri too large

  11. al says:

    http 414 request-URI Too Ltrge

  12. Linda Knoll says:

    I have SeaMonkey, a FireFox sibling without bells and whistles which I’ve found to be the best for playing online games with heavy graphics. The past four days when I try to gift my Farm Town friends, I’ve been getting the above message. This never happened until SeaMonkey demanded I downloaded the “new and approved” version of SeaMonkey — now I get as many script errors as I did with FireFox and in the same games.

    What is with the mega-buck tech companies, Microsoft included, that want to bastardize a product that works well because the ones they favor, or their new products, are riddled with issues and bugs, or just flat stink??? What type of business economics is this?

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