the result of the JavaScript evaluation is encoded in a URL; if this result is too long, the server can't handle it and the client is never alerted.

it seems to me that there are two problems here:

1. the JavaScript which puts together the URL doesn't guard against sending an excessively long URL to the server. I suspect that we will not be able to just rely on the server to be more robust under these circumstances because it is jetty code that is throwing the exception. I think so long as we are using jetty, we will need to keep these URLs down to a manageable length.

2. the selenium server should see the jetty exception and propagate an error to the client instead of letting the client hang

to reproduce this problem, run the GoogleTestSearch test case.