In a comment on patch #728815, you (Bjorn) said, "[p]lus, (I think) it fixes a bug which (I think) only happens when you access the internet from behind a web proxy." Could you split any bug fixes into a patch separate from the code cleanup and refactoring? That will make reviewing it/them easier.
But the bugfix is so simple. :) The original author Dmitry Vasiliev claimed that connecting to www.google.com with port 80 did not always work for him because of a transparent proxy. I believe what he meant was that connection was not guaranteed to timeout. So he changed the port to 21 which www.google.com does not respond to.