156552 - hook up Work Offline mode

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: Toolbars & Menus, enhancement)

Description

[David Haas (gone, not reading mail)]

There used to be a "Work Offline" item in the File menu.
I think it disappeared 6/11/2002 when fix for bug 146320 was made.

Since there's a fair amount of code to handle working offline,
it should be added back in, or the code taken out.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

Confirmed using Chimera/20020708. There is no "File/Work Offline" menu item.

Comment 2

[kaldari]

Updating summary per comment #0 in bug 176650.

Comment 3

[kaldari]

*** Bug 176650 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Cortland Klein]

It appears that in MainMenu.nib, there is still support for this feature. All it
requires is a menu item added back attached to the correct items in the controller.

Comment 5

[Cortland Klein]

Is there anything that should be done to aid in getting this implemented? It is
quite simple to fix, and such an awesome feature to have available.

Comment 6

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

What would offline mode do? Since we don't archive entire web pages like IE, I'm
not clear on the advantages of an offline mode.

Comment 7

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

before access to this feature was removed, how did Offline behave? ie, did it
work? i don't use the offline mode, so i wouldn't know (at this point).

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mozilla has an offline mode, but i'm not familiar with how it works in detail.

Comment 9

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

whoops, accidentally clobbered sfraser's changes.

i can make this a non-rfe depending on the responses to comment 7.

Comment 10

[S Woodside]

I've never understood what "work offline" does in any browser... maybe it's
supposed to let you call up pages in your history if your net connection is down?

Comment 11

[Lauri Kieksi]

It's useful for browsing HTML-formatted documentation or saved pages, and for
dial-up users who want to test web pages they are making themselves before going
online to upload them, and so forth. IE's Offline mode fetches pages from the
browser cache if the user types in a URL or opens a bookmark (er, favorite) that
corresponds to a cache entry, which is useful if the server is down or if the
user's connection doesn't work. I'm not familiar with Mozilla's Offline mode, so
I don't know if it can handle this.

Comment 12

[Lauri Kieksi]

Sorry for the bugzilla spam, forgot to add that in most European countries
dial-up costs serious money due to the duration-based telephone fees, which is
the basis for some of the points in my previous comment.

Comment 13

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

fff

Comment 14

[bluppfisk]

indeed, very annoying not to have this function. It's very useful to have, when
for instance I'm not connected to the internet (like while travelling by train
with my laptop.) I can then prepare all my e-mails and put them to wait in my
outbox. As soon as I get connected, the mails will be sent and I'll be sure I
didn't forget to send any...

Comment 15

[Noemi]

This afternoon my internet service was down, and trying to work in Camino was
unbelievably frustrating - it kept beachballing for a few seconds at a time at
regular intervals, which doesn't happen when I'm browsing with a working
connection.  

Anyhow, an offline mode would have probably made that a bit less frustrating.

Comment 16

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

At such time as this is implemented, we'll need to make sure it doesn't negatively impact bug 152147 (saved sessions).

cl

Comment 17

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

There is some work going on in the Core on this area for Fx 2; see bug 336285 and the tracker bug 216490.

Comment 18

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Is this fixed for Camino too? In Firefox there is such an item in the file menu.

Comment 19

[Stuart Morgan]

No. We'd need Camino-specific work, but more importantly the recent fix was to the 1.9.1 branch, and comments there indicate that it will not be ported to 1.9.0, so the core support is still not available to Camino.

Comment 20

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

So, here's the situation on 1.9.x:

1) Offline mode in Gecko works (see attachment 220609 [details] to bug 336359 and things like http://starkravingfinkle.org/projects/offline/todo.html, and load google.com, close the tab, go offline, and load google.com again)

2) We have preexisting code to make the menu item function, which works when hooked up to a menu item (we should remove the //unused comment from MainController.h)

2a) We need to decide where in the menu it goes

3) The menu item does not get a checkmark when enabled (not sure if I needed to click an additional box somewhere when hooking up the nib, or if we need some code); alternatively, we could make the menu toggle between "Work Offline" and "Go Online" (since Gecko goes offline automatically now, we'd need to keep that in mind when deciding; Firefox just does check/uncheck)

4) We have code (or at least a localizable.string) for adding [Working Offline] to the titlebar: http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/camino/resources/localized/English.lproj/Localizable.strings.in#67  I think cl was the last person to run into that code, and he said it was a mess.  Firefox has nothing that I can tell, but I think I'd find it useful if we did this to the window title.

5) We'd need to tidy up the relevant strings in netError.dtd and appstrings_properties.strings.in

We need to do 2/2a, 3, and 5; 4 would be nice to have.

Comment 21

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: Turns offline mode UI back on

This patch (and the accompanying nib) restores the Work Offline menu item, makes the setTitle calls localizable, and tidies up the Gecko strings related to offline mode.  Our existing code used Work Offline/Go Online, and both cl and I thought that seemed better than an ambiguous/confusing "Work Offline" plus checkbox, so I kept that.

Open questions:

1) Where in the File menu (or some other menu--Camino menu? It's really not a file action, but neither are many other things in the File menu) do we want Work Offline/Go Online to appear?

Current nib has it arbitrarily between Export Bookmarks and Page Setup; that doesn't feel great, but it's decent.  Below the Print stuff kind-of makes sense (and that's where Fx has it), but no Mac app has anything below Print. Other than that, nowhere else in File really seems good.

2) The quotes around “Go Online” in netError.dtd; not sure what's best to do there, but no quotes felt odder to me.  "select" or "choose"? (Also, again it sucks that .dtds can't be localized.)

Finally, all this "works" on 1.9.0 (to the extent it works on 1.9.x; we still don't have some Core features that should be automatic); the only thing that's missing on 1.9.0 is Gecko's autodetection of network state from bug 426932.  People can manually go offline, access visited pages from cache, run the finkle demo, etc.

So I'd like to land this on 1.9.0 (once we've decided issues 1 and 2 and any other issues), and spin the page title offline indication off into another bug if we think it's worthwhile to do (I can't actually see any code for that, so maybe we removed it when cleaning up some title code; I sort-of remember cl saying it was in the way).

Comment 22

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: MainMenu.nib

Associated nib (saved in IB 2.5.6 on 10.5; based on our last test, that should be OK, but I did have to reimport the .h this time)

Comment 23

[Stuart Morgan]

Comment on attachment 427913 [details] [diff] [review]
Turns offline mode UI back on

The code looks fine, except this whole section should be removed:

> 
>   // Indicate that we are working offline.
>   [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"offlineModeChanged" object:nil];

We aren't listening for the notification any more, and if we do re-add the window title stuff we can re-add this or something like it (and we can do better than a hard-coded string for the name).

On 1.9.2, if Gecko auto-detects network state, we need a follow-up bug to listen for whatever notification it gives us and update accordingly; presumably with just this patch, if Gecko decides you are offline, the menu is wrong (although at least it would toggle it, doing the opposite of whatever it said). Or, if that's a pain, we could have the menu validation code query Gecko for the current state, assuming it's not too expensive a check in their code.

1) I would put it in its own section in Camino, between the cache-clearing and Services. File is either window-related or file-related, whereas this is global application state. Be sure to move the declaration of the toggle method in the .h file accordingly, since it's nice having them in the right sections and order (and of course change the string referring to the File menu).

2) What you have in the patch sounds good to me.

sr=smorgan with those changes and the 1.9.2 bug for updating menus on autodetected changes.

Comment 24

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #23)
> On 1.9.2, if Gecko auto-detects network state, we need a follow-up bug to
> listen for whatever notification it gives us and update accordingly; presumably
> with just this patch, if Gecko decides you are offline, the menu is wrong
> (although at least it would toggle it, doing the opposite of whatever it said).

Ooops, I forgot about testing that.  It seems a bit messy currently; when we're auto-offline, selecting "Work Offline" causes us to send Gecko the 'go online' message, so it fires the DOM notifications without seeing if we're actually online (to me that seems like a Gecko bug that's papered over by people having working UI ;) ).  So, yeah, a follow-up on fixing that for sure.

Comment 25

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Landed on cvs trunk with sr comments addressed.  Filed bug 547485 on the notification/menu updates for 1.9.x and bug 547486 on the window title thing.