1597625 - Load a cached welcome page when offline

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

a) Start Thunderbird (for the first time or later).

b) Or start Thunderbird offline.

Actual results:

a) In the main view, the welcome page is shows, see https://i.imgur.com/QLkMxbW.png

b) when offline, the following is shown https://i.imgur.com/9IquWiK.png

Expected results:

A local version of the welcome page (including images and styleshoots) should be shipped with Thunderbird and be stored in e.g. /usr/share/doc/thunderbird and should be shown instead.

The setting under Preferences / General should be altered to offer the user the option "Load online welcome page" which is disabled by default. When disabled, it should load the local version. When enabled, the rest op the current functionality with the welcome page location can be enabled (greyed out) and used as is.

Benefits of this are:

• online activity is by default minimized by reducing security risk and prevent revealing unwanted online activity
• offline version is shown with images and style as default
• online version can be used and with custom location as is now

See also bug 1597611

Comment 1

[Matt]

I see this as an enhancement request, not a report of a failure. Personally I like the idea of having separate appearances for on and off line modes as it provides a visual cue to the user that they are in online or offline mode. I would go further and change the chrome colour for the two modes.

The current approach of loading remote content allows a message relevant to users of a particular version to replace the default web page, that is not possible with hard coded shipped stuff. So I am for anything that improves the ability to communicate with the user about issues that affect them.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I don't think we would make "offline" the default. But we could update the local version with icons, updated text (which should first update our online text, for version 78?), etc?

Ryan, Sancus, what do you think?

Comment 3

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

I'm not sure how the client-side caching works. It looks like it's caching the HTML but not any of the assets? We could make all the assets in-line and then maybe it would just cache everything? Worth looking into.

I will say I'm strongly against making any kind of offline start page the default. The start page is the only way we have to communicate with people who aren't taking updates, and we've used it to warn people when they are seriously far behind on security support, among other things. If we defaulted it to offline, we would no longer have any simple means to directly communicate with users.

Comment 4

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

We need to determine a way to load something in the event that it can't pull the legit start page.

I'm going to rope in Magnus and Alessandro to put this on their radars.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think we should use a local version. But the page could be set up to use a service worker that caches everything and works offline.