selenium: Firefox WebDriver crashes with httplib.BadStatusLine

Meta -

OS: Linux (Debian Jessie) Selenium Version: 2.53.6 (python bindings) Browser: Firefox Browser Version: 47.0.1

Expected Behavior -

Selenium will successfully navigate to a page (http://taobao.com). When manually navigated in the browser this completes sucessfully.

Actual Behavior -

The webdriver and browser crash with httplib.BadStatusLine.

Steps to reproduce -

from selenium import webdriver                                                  

driver = webdriver.Firefox()                                                    
driver.get("http://taobao.com")                                                 
driver.close() 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_firefox.py", line 4, in <module>
    driver.get("http://taobao.com")
  File "python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 248, in get
    self.execute(Command.GET, {'url': url})
  File "python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 234, in execute
    response = self.command_executor.execute(driver_command, params)
  File "python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/remote_connection.py", line 401, in execute
    return self._request(command_info[0], url, body=data)
  File "/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/remote_connection.py", line 433, in _request
    resp = self._conn.getresponse()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 1073, in getresponse
    response.begin()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 415, in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 379, in _read_status
    raise BadStatusLine(line)
httplib.BadStatusLine: ''