1303844 - Offline browsing: flip switchboard flag to enable it in 49 release

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Let's enable this feature in 49 release.

https://github.com/mozilla-services/switchboard-experiments/blob/master/experiments.json#L10

Comment 1

[:Grisha Kruglov]

https://github.com/mozilla-services/switchboard-experiments/pull/58

Comment 2

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Sounds like it is not currently turned on for 49 release. 
Is this an experiment? Or a new feature that is intended to be available for all users?

Comment 3

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Roland, would you mind verifying that this is working?  Or, describe how to test it and we can ask Andrei's team to test it overnight. Thanks!

Comment 4

[:Grisha Kruglov]

(In reply to Liz Henry (:lizzard) (needinfo? me) from comment #2)
> Sounds like it is not currently turned on for 49 release. 
> Is this an experiment? Or a new feature that is intended to be available for
> all users?

This should be enabled now for all release users. I verified it on my local release build (from the Play Store), and it's working.

How to test:
- open up a web page in Fennec. Let it load.
- Toggle Airplane mode
- refresh the web page. It should load, and display "Showing offline version" blue snackbar.

Comment 5

[Roland Tanglao needinfo please :rolandtanglao, :mohnkuchen, :adobo, :sinigang, :roland]

i tested it with grisha's steps in comment 4 yesterday afternoon! it works! clearing needinfo

Comment 6

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I am a bit concerned that this is not working as intended I see https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/53zkes/android_can_i_disable_the_offline_viewing_feature/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/54hemo/firefox_for_android_shows_cached_offline_version/ as user complaints that the feature is not working as intended.

Comment 7

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Ugh, yes, there are (unnecessary) bugs with it in 49. Backstory is that some of the patches that significantly affect this feature landed in 50 and were never uplifted into 49. As a result, what's currently in 49 is quite buggy :-(

Specifically, these bugs didn't get uplifted in time:
- Bug 1282621, Bug 1277467, Bug 1278980, Bug 1277333.

Reading the reddit posts, I think uplifting Bug 1282621 (easy fix) will help quite a bit, as it gets the GeckoNetworkManager to work reliably, and thus tab shouldn't get stuck in an offline mode.

Other bugs deal with UI aspect of this (essentially re-writing how this notification is displayed), which are more significant code-wise, but aren't as critical to the user experience. I'll forward you an email I've sent to Liz about this, essentially outlining the above.

Comment 8

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Reading those user reports again, and the change in Bug 1282621, it seems possible that without that bugfix users might get "stuck" in a "load from cache" mode while they're online, which is strictly worse than pages simply not loading from cache when they should. I don't have clear STRs for this, but if that is indeed the case we should consider disabling this functionality via switchboard for 49, either until a 49.x release (?) or until 50 where this is fixed.

Comment 9

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

That does sound worse than I had understood earlier. Sebastian, Barbara, what do you think? 

If we treat this as the driver for a Fennec dot release I would like to know that there is a better test plan. Why did we not catch these problems in beta? Is a week or so long enough to figure it out? We may want to consider turning the feature off until 50.

Comment 10

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

As I just wrote in a mail: We could consider pulling the feature because it is behind switchboard flags. This might be easier than having a dot release that could still have issues?

Comment 11

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Yes, that sounds better. Sounds like we should pull this until either a dot release (nothing planned yet) or 50 release, currently scheduled for Nov. 7th. Grisha, thanks for being on top of the user complaints and tracking down the cause.

Comment 12

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Can you create a new bug (rather than reopening this one) to track the change?