firefox defaults to offline

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 02 July 2014, Joe Zeff sent:
> My attitude toward this is that *I* am the network check. 

It tends to be the best approach.  It's confusing if a client decides
it's offline, for some reason (that may not be correct), and not only
goes offline, but doesn't really inform you about it, and doesn't like
to go online when you fight against it.

Automatically detecting it isn't too easily done.  For instance, I am on
a LAN, with a local web server.  I can easily be only browsing the local
webserver, while the internet is unavailable.  So I wouldn't want
Firefox to go offline because it couldn't detect some remote service.
And it couldn't use the PC's NetworkManager status to determine whether
I was online, as it's another device that connects to the internet.

The whole work-offline mode is fundamentally broken, anyway, by the huge
plethora of websites that just will not work offline.  Whether because
they're very dynamic, keep using the same URI but sending other request
information to receive new data, or are deliberately cache hostile.
Browsers often - but oddly, not always - refuse to work offline with my
own local webserver, serving flat HTML, with standard URIs.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.