483754 - Starting up Thunderbird with network offline doesn't work properly

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

With offline.autoDetect = true and starting up in offline mode with various settings, we just don't do the right things.

offline.startup_state can be set to a number of options. Here's the problem areas for what we're doing in each state:

0) Remember Last State (UI option):

If last state was online, and network is offline, TB starts in online mode and tries to connect to servers (hence alerts).

1) Ask for online state (UI option):

If you tell it to work online, you get the same issue as 0).

2) Always online (UI option):

Same issue as 0).

3) Always offline

Works as expected.

4) Automatic

Works as expected.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I think this is where autoDetect starts to conflict with our UI preferences. My current proposals for how to rework this:

0) Remember Last State:

If the last state was online, let the network decide what mode to start in.

1) Ask for online state:

If the network is detected as offline, change the dialog to say its offline, and either allow a re-try or just start up offline.

2) Always online:

Rework this to be "automatic" i.e. detect the state of the network if we're doing autoDetect.

Not sure if any of this will warrant a change in the wording of the prefs UI.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Attachment: [checked in] Possible fix for always online and remember last state cases

As I mentioned in comment 1, I think this is where autoDetect conflicts with our preferences. I think this is the best options for these two cases though:

If "Always online" is selected and autoDetect is on, allow network service to set the network into whatever state it detects the network as.

If "Remember last state" is selected and autoDetect is on and we were online last time round then let the network state dictate what state we start up in, otherwise, select offline.


I don't think these are quite ideal, but I'm not sure we can do better whilst supporting both prefs (which we need to because linux doesn't support autoDetect). Therefore requesting UI review in case Bryan can think of better ways of doing this.

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Comment on attachment 367985 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] Possible fix for always online and remember last state cases

Took some time to think it over and I think you have the best solution possible.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 367985 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] Possible fix for always online and remember last state cases

sure, let's try this.

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 367985 [details] [diff] [review]
[checked in] Possible fix for always online and remember last state cases

Checked in: http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/fcb7cbdcfe88

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Marking as fixed - although the second part could possibly still do with improvement, I'm not convinced its that widely used to make it worth doing. AFAICT there's no existing bugs on it.