1590544 - Add a list of offline available sites

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Sebastiaan Andeweg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

n/a

Actual results:

FireFox supports ServiceWorkers, which allows websites to make themselves available when the user is offline. Some websites implement this, others do not (yet). As a user without connection (on a plane, for example) it's not clear which sites are available offline, and which are not. The best they can try is guessing, by coming up with URLs and visiting those sites, to see if there is content available.

Expected results:

A nicer experience would be a page that lists all offline available websites. No other site would know this other than the browser itself. FireFox could make a list available.

For example, under the "File" > "Work Offline" option, a list of recently visited but available websites could be shown, with an item for "Show All Offline Sites".

Comment 1

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

I confirm this bug as an enhancement suggestion. I will set its component as (Firefox) Site Identity. A more skilled person will know how to address this idea. If incorrect, please set a more appropriate component. Thank you!

Comment 2

[(inactive) Nihanth Subramanya [:nhnt11]]

Moving this to Firefox::General, because I'm not sure this actually belongs in the Site Identity panel. We have several questions to answer here:

1. Can this be implemented?
2. If so, should it be?
3. If so, what's the best UI? Where should it live? How should it be accessed?

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

We currently list information about registered service workers in about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox towards the bottom, although a Service Worker being registered is no guarantee that it's going to show you cached information on a page load. That might be a hard problem actually, a contrived example is a Service Worker that pulls page data out of its offline cache only on Tuesdays. How do we detect that programmatically? We're approaching halting problem issues there.