Our default iframe ping timeouts may be too low

Describe the bug

When scanning child iframes, our extension has to wait for a response from each frame. We have to balance two possibilities:

• Analysis or messaging inside the child frame may be slow, so we need to wait long enough for a response. Giving up too early means we lose results.
• The child frame may be entirely unresponsive; perhaps messaging is disabled altogether. Waiting too long means our users get confused because the spinning circle goes forever.

We need to pick the right timeout values so that we can scan as many websites as possible without waiting so long that users get annoyed when child frames are unresponsive.

There are two places where we currently wait for a response:

• we use axe-core’s default pingWaitTime value of 500ms
• we have a custom messenger timeout of 500ms for tab-stops, visualizations, etc (anything that isn’t automated checks)

We have encountered a website on our support channel that requires a higher timeout. No matter what, we should notify the user that their iframe wasn’t scanned (tracked separately in #6128).

But this issue tracks whether we should also change our default timeouts.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to this demo page
2. Check the “delay propagation” checkbox
3. Scan the website with AI-Web
4. Notice we find no issues in the child iframe (we should, the input is empty)

Expected behavior

We have a few options:

• Accept a higher ping timeout. In local testing on my computer, increasing the timeouts to 1000ms allows us to scan this website. However, different environments will have different performance - it’s possible that even 1000ms is too low for some setups.
• Allow the end-user to configure the ping timeout from their extension. It could be a developer setting.
• Leave things as they are

Context (please complete the following information)

• AI-Web Version & Environment: 2.35 prod

[ferBonnin]

@shanisebarona assigning to you per draft PR 🙂

[msftbot[bot]]

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