502659 - Firefox should not enter offline mode when a user is disconnected

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 620472

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

Putting the user into offline automatically mode when internet connectivity is down is not the best way to handle internet connectivity errors, because it does not adequately describe what most users are experiencing nor what most users likely want.  

In the majority of cases, when a users sees the "Firefox is currently in offline mode and can't browse the Web" message, their internet connection has simply dropped.  It's unlikely that they deliberately wanted to enter offline mode.  My guess is that most users don't even know what offline mode is: they know their connection has dropped, and thus throwing them to "offline mode" is a mental disconnect from what they understand the situation to be.

Also, in these cases, the advice given in the error ("Uncheck "Work Offline" in the File menu, then try again.") will not work.  I recommend a clearer message that tells a user they are not connected to the internet, and provides tools such as a link to launch their operating system's network diagnosis application.

Comment 1

[d]

I agree that this isn't good behavior and that it could say something like "Firefox has been disconnected from the Internet. Do you want to enter offline mode?" instead of automatically sending the user into it.

Comment 2

[Michael Kraft [:morac]]

I agree this is not desired.  It is more annoying when you take into account that when a Windows machine goes into Standby or Hibernation it shuts down the network.  If Firefox is left running, then it goes into offline mode upon resumption from hibernation or Standby state.

Many times the user is not even aware this has occurred.  I've personally started browsing my normal sites, wondering why they haven't updated until I get the "firefox is offline page", wasting my last 5 or 10 minutes.

Any time of user prompt would be better than what's it's doing now, since it won't automatically disable offline mode when the network is detected.

Comment 3

[Michael Kraft [:morac]]

I threw together a simple add-on which will prevent Firefox from automatically entering offline mode when it detects a loss of network.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13152

Comment 4

[Darren]

I agree - very bad UI especially considering that there's no warning to the user that FF has entered offline mode. FF 3.5 silently switches to offline mode every time my XP SP3 laptop comes out of standby and I have to manually change it back. My suggestions:

1. At a minimum an option in about:config to stop FF using Network Manager to determine offline status. Is this what toolkit.networkmanager.disable does/did on Linux builds?

2. Far preferable is an UI option to the do same as 1.

3. In addition to 2, a standard webpage that is shown to warn user that Firefox has lost network connection with options to enter offline mode, continue without entering offline mode, a checkbox to not display warning again and instructions for disabling network monitoring (see 1 and 2).

Comment 5

[Daniel O'Connor]

I don't see this behaviour at all - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

If I physically remove the network cable from my machine, or use the network connection tools in windows to disable my network, there's no behaviour change.

I'm somewhat interested in having said behaviour for Bug #336359 - which is a different usecase altogether.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I assume we've read through the bugs that implemented this behavior and have reasons for why the arguments used for it are no good?