812694 - Facebook sidebar thinks I'm disconnected, but I'm not.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: SocialAPI: Providers, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Screenshot

Using the 11/14 Mac Nightly. Facebook seems to thing I'm not connected, but I very much am online (and have been so for hours). Seems like whatever on/offline detection they have is broken, not dynamic, or needs a user-accessable way to force it to try again.

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

...apparently it's not _completely_ broken, it decided to go back to normal just now. Server down? Not checking online state enough? Hmm.

Comment 3

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

They tried using the ononline/onoffline functionality in the worker, but the problem they ran into was that we turn off the wifi detection (network.manage-offline-status) by default.  Instead they are using the connection status of their mqtt websocket (in their worker) to determine online status.

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Their detection is really terrible. I've been sitting here -- very much online, doing onliney things in my online web browser -- and it suddenly decided to go offline, and has been stuck that way for a while now.

Sounds like they need to (1) be more robust in their detection (eg ignore transient failures, check multiple sources) and (2) be faster about going back online.

Comment 5

[David Ascher (:davida)]

Side note: this feels like an awesome API that browsers could indicate to websites, centralizing that capability in the UA (who has access to things like wifi status, network link state, etc.)  Don't we have something like that in WebAPI?

Comment 6

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Now I'm on my home WiFi, and it's doing it yet again in the middle of a browsing session. :(

I'm pretty worried about the impression this may be making on people about not just Social API but also Firefox as a product.

Are other people seeing this? Or is this just me?

Comment 7

[Nigel Babu [:nigelb]]

I've seen this behavior as well. On completely stable connection, it shows I'm offline. In the middle of the conversation sometimes.

Comment 8

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Working with our colleagues at FB, we believe we understand the problem and they are working hard on getting the fix into production ASAP.

Comment 9

[deviantgeekbunny]

The fix for this should be live by EOD, please restart your browser and let me know if you still see the issue.

Comment 10

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

This seems better than before (I haven't seen it randomly freak out), but it just happened again.

My MBP was asleep, came into work and opened it up, and the sidebar changed to the greyed out / "You're not connected to Messenger" state again. That was 25 minutes ago and my network has been working fine since I got on.

I'd guess the specific bug here is a race between exiting sleep, DHCPing the network, and when Facebook's online-or-not check happens.

But the general problem I noted in comment 0 and 4 still applies -- there will always be network glitches of some sort, and a robust fix needs to avoid getting into a semi-permanent offline state when that isn't the case (_especially_ because there's no obvious way for the user to do something about it, like a reload button). This clearly still seems to be broken.