1063003 - Firefox 32 can get stuck in perpetual offline mode

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1062575

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

I'm not entirely sure the sequence of steps that causes this to happen. I've seen it occur in 3 scenarios. I'm having trouble reproducing it in a fresh profile but that may be because the issue is triggered when a tab fails to load a site (this is a guess).

The symptoms are that Firefox can get stuck in Offline Mode.

This is on : Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0

Scenario 1

Through some means the browser ends up with some tabs displaying the "Offline Mode" message. Offline mode is not enabled (if you look in the file menu) and if you go to another tab, sites load just fine. If you go to the tab with the "Offline Mode" message and either
* click "Try Again"
* Refresh the page

The "Offline Mode" page is displayed again and Firefox switches globally to Offline Mode (as seen in the File menu). At this point all tabs when interacted with change to the Offline Mode message until you go up to the File menu and uncheck offline mode.

Anything loaded in a tab with the Offline Mode message again drops you back into offline mode. For example, if after unchecking offline mode in the the File menu, you go back to the tab with the Offline Mode message being displayed and type in some other URL, firefox drops back into offline mode. The only way to get the original URL to display is to copy paste it out of the tab, close the tab, open a new tab, paste it in. This is easy to reproduce.

Scenario 2

From a working tab (not stuck in offline mode), browse to a site that will in turn spawn a popup (e.g. etherpad which spawns the Persona popup). The site loads just fine (as we're not in offline mode). Click Sign In to launch the pop up. The Persona pop up comes up just fine. Sign in such that the popup closes and focus returns to the main window and Etherpad displays the offline mode message and switches Firefox into Offline Mode globally. This is easy to reproduce.

Scenario 3

Close Firefox (with it set to remember and re-open your tabs). Launch Firefox and sometimes it will drop into offline mode. This one unlike scenario 1 2 and 4 is intermittent.

Scenario 4

Browse to Youtube. Click Upload to upload a video. In the file selection window select the video and click ok. The video uploads. Youtube does some background call or redirect to update the page indicating the video is uploaded and they're now processing it. Youtube then reports that you're having network problems because the background call was blocked because Firefox dropped into offline mode. This is easy to reproduce.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rRFqNPs-t4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxwZetVaqQ

Comment 1

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

I sit in SF (7th floor) and anyone is welcome to come by and see the behavior, gather logs/diagnostics etc.

Comment 2

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

Here's something in Firefox 32 related to Offline Mode : Bug 795764

Comment 3

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

As this was making my use of Firefox pretty much impossible, and I didn't want to try blowing away my cache, sessionstore or profile, I downgraded back to 31 and the problem is gone.

I believe this confirms that this is a new bug in 32.

Comment 4

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

And for anyone else that needs to do this downgrade :

I went to about:config and set these two options :

app.update.auto - false
app.update.enabled - false

Then pulled down this file

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-security/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+build/6185571/+files/firefox_31.0%2Bbuild1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1_amd64.deb

From this page

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/31.0+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1

and installed it with 

sudo dpkg -i firefox_31.0+build1-0ubuntu0.14.04.1_amd64.deb

I had previously on 32 tried setting toolkit.networkmanager.disable to true to see if that fixed the problem (before doing the downgrade) and it did not.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Reporter: Do you have extensions installed in general and in special the extension "DNS Cache" ?
(BTW: I still dream about the nice view from the SF 7th floor)

Comment 6

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

:Matti, I do have extensions installed (and am happy to list out which ones and which versions if that's useful).

Funny you should ask, I do have "DNS Cache 1.7" installed.

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

With a @mozilla address most community bug triagers may think that you already tried the basic troubleshooting :-)
It's a good thing in general to try the Firefox safemode (Help-> Restart with addons disabled) if you have issues after an update. The safemode disables all extensions, the Javascript jit, graphic hardware acceleration and probably other things until you restart Firefox again in the normal mode.

Disabling DNS Cache 1.7 should fix your issue if i read bug 1062575 :-)

Comment 8

[Gene Wood [:gene]]

> With a @mozilla address most community bug triagers may think that you already tried the basic troubleshooting :-)

Totally understand. Is there a page on mana or somewhere with things like safemode that would constitute basic troubleshooting for Firefox Desktop issues? I want to avoid wasting anyone's time but did a good deal of searching before filing the bug without success. I'd love to have a go to place on how to go about this kind of thing (as a mozillian) in the future.

I'll try out Firefox 32 with DNS Cache 1.7 removed, thanks for the suggestion.

Comment 9

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

(In reply to Gene Wood [:gene] from comment #8)
> Totally understand. Is there a page on mana or somewhere with things like
> safemode that would constitute basic troubleshooting for Firefox Desktop
> issues? 

I can't comment on mana because that is a Mozilla internal page and requires a LDAP login. I'm only a community triager (for a long time) and returned yesterday after a 1 year break.
I think that many triagers will also only comment on bugs reported by a @mozilla address if they know the exact cause of the reported issue and don't do the usual troubleshooting for a "usual" bug reporter. What makes it worse is that this bug was reported as "NEW" and in "General" and not in "Untriaged". A bug in the "general" component is in general a bad idea if you want to get it fixed.
The result can be that a bug report gets basically ignored and you should be aware why this can happen.

>I want to avoid wasting anyone's time but did a good deal of
> searching before filing the bug without success. I'd love to have a go to
> place on how to go about this kind of thing (as a mozillian) in the future.

I noticed that you have spend quite some time due to the research how to install an older Firefox version.
You didn't waste my or the time from someone else with this report.....

Trying the safemode (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode) is always a good thing to do before opening a bug report. The safemode disables more than just the addons. You should know that in case you have an issue that doesn't appear in the safemode and manually disabling all addons in the normal mode still shows the bug.
You can also try a new profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles to be sure that no special setting in Firefox or a corrupt file is causing the issue.