[ale] waiting for HTTP response forever ?

[jjj863 at gmail.com (Jerry Yu)]

I ran into a scenario where firefox overly patiently wait for a
response from the server.  the response was dropped on the floor by a
load balancer within a minute. Firefox 1.5.0.4 and IE 6 keep spinning
their hour-glass, for over 25 minutes now.
question : when should firefox/IE or other browser say enough is
enough, per RFC and/or per implementation of firefox/IE?

The tcp sequence consists of 5 packets in total:
c->s  syn
c<-s  syn ack
c->s  ack
c->s  HTTP GET /blah.jsp
c<-s  ack
----total silence-----