226096 - Browse/Work Offline should be per Tab

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Tabbed browsing is awesome (one of Mozilla's differentiating features) and Work
Offline is excellent if you learn how to use it - but the 2 don't go well together.

Consider this scenario:
I have 3 tabs open.
Tabs 1 and 2 are busy downloading pages I've never seen.
In Tab 3, I'm about to click on a Visited link. I know that it's in my cache.

I have the following options:
* If I simply click the link, I'll slow my other 2 tabs down and wait a long
time to get the page.

* If I click "Work Offline," I screw up the other 2 page loads - at the very
least the images - but my clicked link shows up immediately.


This is why Work Offline should be per-tab.


I recommend the following UI:

When user has 2 or more tabs open:
Clicking plug icon in lower-right disconnects the current tab.
File menu shows:
Work Offline in this Tab
Work Offline (all Tabs)

When user has only 1 tab open (or cannot see the tabbar) in that window:
Clicking plug icon in lower-right disconnects the only tab.
File menu shows:
Work Offline in this Tab <-- disabled
Work Offline

If a user creates a new Tab, it should take the Online/Offline state of the
currently open Tab.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Hermann Schwab]

Nice idea, but wouldn´t that be too much for an average Joe like me?
I´m normally using ten to twenty tabs, and I don´t think I would see which are
on- and which are offline, if they aren´t coloured differently.
Besides, the only time I´m going offline, is, when I definitely don´t want to be
online, looking at some suspicious mail or so, and beeing partly online then
wouldn´t help me at all, increase only the risk that I´m doing something in an
online tab what I would do in an offline tab only.

Comment 2

[Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini]

Let's consider the use-case:

1) User doesn't really know what they're doing.
If this is the case, they probably also don't know about tabs ;o)

2) User is going offline completely.
Just use the Work Offline (all Tabs) command. The user has SOME knowledge of how
things work, and the menu item is clear.

3) User is going offline in one tab to prevent an e-mail from doing horrible things.
This works out too - if you click anything and it happens to open a new tab or
window, that tab takes the state of the originating tab - which will still be
Offline.

I agree that if this feature were implemented, Offline Tabs ought to have an
Offline icon in their tab title - as a clearer cue.

Comment 3

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

Marking this new since there is no bug like this
anyway this can be solved very good with the zone modell so i mark this depend
on Bug 169106; because then there could be a modell that every tab has it's own
zone and Gecko checks against the zone settings and online/offline state (which
is infact also some access restriciton).

Comment 4

[benc]

RECOMMEND won'tfix. - just too complicated for limited functionality.

Comment 5

[Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini]

Let's simplify it then.

Make the online/offline control at bottom-right act per-tab. No other changes.

Without this change the control does not work correctly while *any* tab is
loading in the window.
 
Steps to reproduce:
On a slow connection:
1. Open 2 tabs - Tab 1 with a site in your cache and Tab 2 not in your cache.
2. Click a link in Tab 1.
3. Switch to Tab 2.
4. Click the control to Work Offline.
5. Click a link.

Link loads in tab 2, but tab 1's load will never finish, with no error message,
and the icon will just stick to the "loading" animation.

Comment 6

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

*** Bug 298387 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[benc]

-> MAS, this is probably UI. If changes to Necko need to be made to support this, please file a new bug in Core:Networking, and make it a blocking bug.

Comment 8

[chAlx]

I believe the bug is about Core Networking or other Core, at Any platform, not SeaMonkey and UI.

And it should be feature request without touching overall offline mode.

Personally I'd like to disable the activity of opened page. SeaMonkey has some per-host permissions but it has nothing to quick switch permission for one tab without touching another with same host.

BTW bug 169106 has nothing about per-tab zones. And there is no any zones yet ;)