Closed Bug 216490 Opened 21 years ago Closed 8 years ago

Implement full working offline browsing feature

Categories

(Core Graveyard :: Tracking, enhancement)

x86
All
enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: gabriele_fava, Assigned: chofmann)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug)

Details

(Keywords: meta)

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Opera7.0; Windows 98)
Build Identifier: 2003071814

I never got the cache decently working. I don't know if it does for someone.
What I intend for decent cache is something that permit to offline browse your
pages for at least the time set for the history, whatever options you set in
"compare the page in the cache to the page etc...".

Among other things, the cache should not be lost if the program crash (I don't
know if it's the current case).

Offline browsing is really important for dial-up people, which pay the
connection per minute and per connection, and they're not so few by the way.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Reporter, what is your complaint exactly ? What doesn't work ? I can browse
offline, as long as all pages can be found in my cache. When it can't be found,
or when the page wasn't allowed to be cached (happens quite often, and Mozilla
seems to be more strict than Exploder), I get a warning dialog.

The reason that the cache is cleaned after a crash, is that it might have become
corrupted during that crash. The purpose of the cache is not just to support
offline browsing - it's mainly a performance enhancement.
In addition, if the browser is crashing:

1. submit talkback if avaliable

--stop--

OR:

1. if it is reproducible, download a nightly zipped build and unzip, run, and test.

2. submit a post to www.mozillazine.org and get some help narrowing what causes
it. This is really hard. I'm still working on this.

3. file a bug report.

This is my reccomendation.

The product totalrecall is designed to help with the cache and settings
disappearing with crashes.

http://totalrecall.mozdev.org

Opera has this feature built-in.

www.opera.com

And.. Internet Explorer has excellent offline browsing support. Just add the
page to favorites and then tell it to make it avaliable offline. Click Customize
and specify settings. e-mail me if you have any questions.

--Sam
WFM, Mac OS X and Win 2K, Mozilla 1.6b.

I've been using this a lot this week while testing offline mode for the browser.

-> defaults.

Please try again w/ a new profile, and use a page like www.mozilla.org. You
might have a cache problem in your current profile.
Assignee: gordon → darin
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

I was under the assumption (reading the Firebird posts) that this was a known bug.  
Whenever Firebird crashes the whole cache is deleted.  The problem is that more
often than not FB will silent crash (meaning that the user never knows it has
crashed). 

As the original poster pointed out offline browsing is important for dial-up
users. I myself will spend 30 minutes DL'ing pages.  Imagine my surprise when i
later go back to find the pages are not available!  Even though (from my point
of view it never crashed).  This is a waste of money for me.  I should use IE
BUT I really love FB... this is the single biggest problem in my opinion. 

If firebird is going to have an offline mode (which it should -- it's a bloody
standard) then the cache becomes more than a performce feature.  

Can someone please tell me what I can do to help.  Is there some debug file i
can send?  I don't think Talkback came with FB 0.7
I am more than willing to help out with this bug.  Just let me know what you
need in terms of user feedback. 

Please do not ask me to use a different profile though... I have done this many
times while testing. 

I'm using WinXP. 
I think this is the same bug as 105843 
*** Bug 232813 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think the poster means that when i go offline and I type URL of a previous
seen page, Mozilla answers that it's not available while offline, even though
caching is active. This is what happens to me (1.7 under Mandrake, but
experiencing it since 0.9), and it's equivalent to not having offline browsing.
Quite annoying. I think it depends by some checks that shouldn't be done in
offline mode (DNS resolving or checks for expiration dates). For a while I've
used WWWOFFLED (a proxy able to provide cached contents even in offline mode),
but would be good having such a feature in Mozilla. 
I too have experienced this problem in FF1.0.  It is the single biggest
disappointment I have with FF.  As a dialup user, I really need the 'work
offline' mode to WORK.  That means, that all pages stored in the cache/history
should be completely viewable when no intenet connection is present.  Currently,
this only works occasionally, and only for pages visited within a few days. 
What's the poing of having a 100mb cahce file if you can't access it?
Depends on: 105843
Depends on: 175600
I propose to change this bug's title to "Implement full working offline browsing
feature", as the latest dependency additions seems to consider it like that.
Alternatively I'll make a new bug with that title.
Summary: Offline browsing-cache never works → Implement full working offline browsing feature
Severity: normal → enhancement
re: Severity downgrade from 'normal' to 'enhancement'.

Not if you're using dial-up!!!  I know that dial-up users are a shrinking
minority (at least in the developed world), but I don't think they are a
minority whose needs should be ignored or trivialised.  But then, I guess they
can always switch back to IE, which has had this feature ever since I can
remember . . . 
Depends on: 212251
The problem with this bug is that it has no specific complaints. Yes, offline
browsing doesn't really work very well, I agree (I see the same thing myself).
But to get this bug fixed, we need to know _exactly_ what needs to change.

This means that someone needs to work out what actually isn't working.
Specifically, it means giving a set of steps to reproduce, in the form:
  1. Click X.
  2. Click Y.
  3. Type Z.
...or whatever is necessary, and then it needs a description of what should
happen when those steps are followed, and a description of what _does_ happen.

Only then will this bug be fixed.


If anyone actually does want to do that, then I strongly recommend filing new
bugs and then marking them as blocking this bug, as has been done with bug
105843, bug 175600, and bug 212251.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Component: Networking: Cache → Tracking
Ever confirmed: true
Keywords: meta
Comment #10 the change from "normal" to "enhancement" is not a downgrade, it
just means that this bug file is not about a real bug in the program but about a
feature not currently implemented which is requested to be added. It's not an
importance assessment.
It has been said many times that offline browsing was never meant to be in
Mozilla and that the current cache is there just as a limited performance
enchancement, similar to processors' or disks' caches.

Hickson initially this bug was rather vague because I didn't exactly know if
offline browsing was meant to be there or not. As I told before it has been
clarified that offline browsing is currently not meant to be in Mozilla (even if
some interface elements might make you think in a different way); this is thus a
*real* request for enhancement.
I modified this bug rather than making a new one because this has some
interesting comments and anyway its claim was basically this.
This bug is not a tracking bug for all cache-related bugs, cache is one thing
and offline-browsing is another thing.
If we decide that we want offline browsing to share some of its code with the
cache this RFE needs some existent cache bugs to be fixed, but there are still 
 other things to do then most probably.

I don't know if it's correct to set it as a tracking bug, there should probably
be some discussion on the implementation, but it's a thing that shouldn't change
so much so do as you like.
"It has been said many times that offline browsing was never meant to be in
Mozilla and that the current cache is there just as a limited performance
enchancement, similar to processors' or disks' caches."

Just out of interest, why was offline browing never an intended feature?  It
strikes me as a pretty important capability, especially if Mozilla was to be
targeted at as broad a user-base as possible.  Perhaps fewer people took
advantage of this feature in IE than I thought.  Having taken this feature for
granted on IE, I was really shocked and disappointed not to find it in Ff.  And
I know some dial-up users who refused to switch to Ff solely for this reason.
*** Bug 269962 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
> Why was offline browing never an intended feature?  It
> strikes me as a pretty important capability, especially if Mozilla was to be
> targeted at as broad a user-base as possible.  
> I know some dial-up users who refused to switch to Ff solely for this reason.


I fully agree to the fact that Offline browsing is a great feature that is a pain in Firefox ...
Maybe related to Firefox bug 316557?
(In reply to comment #16)
> Maybe related to Firefox bug 316557?
> 

Kind of related, only that bug 316557 says the user be allowed to specify the sites that need caching - one step ahead of what we were specifying - cache all pages and let them be accessible offline. This feature or the lack of it turns off many users from using Ff ...
*** Bug 317128 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Depends on: 194536
Depends on: 291224
Assignee: darin → chofmann
QA Contact: networking.cache → chofmann
So is this being implemented ???
(In reply to comment #19)
> So is this being implemented ???

First of all, pleace do not post a comment in Bugzilla unless you have something new to contribute <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html>. Offline browsing has been working for quite some time, but it's not working optimally because of the bugs in the "depends on" list. When those are fixed, offline browsing should be fully working.
Depends on: 336284
Depends on: 336285
Depends on: 263590
Depends on: 387545
Depends on: 388743
Depends on: 314631
Depends on: 434205
Depends on: 290032
Old bug.

I confirm this issue, the offline browsing feature never works works.

Maybe you can use LIFO stack for offline browsing. i.e if the allocated space for offline browsing fills up, the oldest (possibly the oldest file which was last used) content of the cache will be deleted to free up adequate space.
Offline browsing certainly does work. Some might argue that it works too well. Sometimes I can browse for about a minute before I realize I'm not connected to the Internet. Usually, I either go to a page that should have been updated in the past several hours or I get the offline error message if I go to a page that isn't in the cache, and I finally realize I'm viewing pages from the disk cache. This bug is about making offline browsing work *better*, by increasing the number of cache hits.
better cache(addon) has a great way to optimize this
can we borrow the code and implement it?
(In reply to magnumarchonbasileus from comment #23)
> better cache(addon) has a great way to optimize this
> can we borrow the code and implement it?

Which addon?
(In reply to Angus from comment #13)
> "It has been said many times that offline browsing was never meant to be in
> Mozilla and that the current cache is there just as a limited performance
> enchancement, similar to processors' or disks' caches."
> 
> Just out of interest, why was offline browing never an intended feature?  It
> strikes me as a pretty important capability, especially if Mozilla was to be
> targeted at as broad a user-base as possible.  Perhaps fewer people took
> advantage of this feature in IE than I thought.  Having taken this feature
> for
> granted on IE, I was really shocked and disappointed not to find it in Ff. 
> And
> I know some dial-up users who refused to switch to Ff solely for this reason.

Yep & offline browsing comes handy while testing websites too !!

(In reply to dE from comment #24)
> (In reply to magnumarchonbasileus from comment #23)
> > better cache(addon) has a great way to optimize this
> > can we borrow the code and implement it?
> 
> Which addon?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bettercache/
(In reply to Sillius Soddus from comment #25)
> (In reply to Angus from comment #13)
> > "It has been said many times that offline browsing was never meant to be in
> > Mozilla and that the current cache is there just as a limited performance
> > enchancement, similar to processors' or disks' caches."
> > 
> > Just out of interest, why was offline browing never an intended feature?  It
> > strikes me as a pretty important capability, especially if Mozilla was to be
> > targeted at as broad a user-base as possible.  Perhaps fewer people took
> > advantage of this feature in IE than I thought.  Having taken this feature
> > for
> > granted on IE, I was really shocked and disappointed not to find it in Ff. 
> > And
> > I know some dial-up users who refused to switch to Ff solely for this reason.
> 
> Yep & offline browsing comes handy while testing websites too !!
> 
> (In reply to dE from comment #24)
> > (In reply to magnumarchonbasileus from comment #23)
> > > better cache(addon) has a great way to optimize this
> > > can we borrow the code and implement it?
> > 
> > Which addon?
> 
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bettercache/

Seriously, that addon made browsing ****.

I suggest, dynamic pages should be cached, but just for offline use.
Marking all tracking bugs which haven't been updated since 2014 as INCOMPLETE.
If this bug is still relevant, please reopen it and move it into a bugzilla component related to the work
being tracked. The Core: Tracking component will no longer be used.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 8 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
Product: Core → Core Graveyard
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