Firefox's network error pages are familiar to everyone.

But they're not very useful. Most people, if they're like me, see this wall of text and interpret it to mean "the internet broke and we have no idea why."

The fundamental question users want answered when they see this is: is there something I can do to fix this?

Now, the architecture of the internet makes it fairly hard to actually pinpoint why a network is down.

As James Fallows explains in his article "The Connection Has Been Reset" from The Atlantic's March 2008 issue...

some national governments even exploit this to prevent their people from seeing things that the government doesn't want them to see.

All this means that a "server not found" error page could have been raised because...

the user's network connection got unplugged...

or it could be because their local router is down...

or it could be because their ISP is having problems...

or because their corporation is blocking access to the site...

or because their government is...

or it could be because the site is actually down.

Firefox should do its best to answer that fundamental question: is there something I can do to fix this and get where I want to go?

Enter Herdict.

Herdict is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, a brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain, that attempts to use crowdsourcing to generate a global picture of internet connectivity.

Put simply, it uses the power of the internet itself to ask the question: can other people on the internet see this site? If so, who?

Firefox can use the answers to these questions to help answer the user's fundamental question: is there something I can do to fix this?

This Labs Experiment is an attempt at picturing what Firefox-Herdict integration might look like.

It's intended to be as unintrusive as possible to the user experience, so it only aims to improve upon the already notoriously unhelpful network error pages.

Rather than being a final solution, this Labs Experiment is intended to build mindshare and catalyze discussion about what a better network error page might look like...

in keeping with Mozilla's tradition of creating things that do stuff to make the internet better.