Smart offline mode

[Luca_Pavan]

Offline mode can be useful, mostly to who is online few times, but also if you just want to see a webpage again to read a problem solving guide, a new recipe, play a game or whatever it is. Google Chrome already has this feature, if you go offline it allow to open webpages that you already viewed loading them by its cache without need to enable offline mode, it's a kind of smart surfing configuration so the user hasn't to worry about enabling it each time it's needed.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[jscher2000]

On Windows, Firefox has

(menu bar) File > Work Offline

You can use Alt+F to summon the menu when the menu bar is hidden (hiding the menu bar is a Windows platform guideline, so that's the default configuration).

It seems to work the way you want, assuming the site didn't instruct Firefox never to stores its pages in the cache.

In my little test, sometimes pages seemed to load without all of the images, and sometimes using the back button led to a message that Firefox was offline. In both cases, reloading the page (Ctrl+R) successfully built the page from the cache. On some sites, reloading might be dangerous as it might trigger scripts to detect whether you are offline and destroy the content.

[Luca_Pavan]

Yes, thanks, I thought it was removed from Firefox, but why it was removed from the main menu? And you're right about content loading issue, when I was using offline mode some time ago I even repoted this issue that some pages are loaded but some content isn't loaded or with default format instead of the webpage custom format. Do you think that it would be useful to set Firefox to load cache pages automatically when offline by default instead of enabling offline mode manually?

[Luca_Pavan]

Perhaps when you click to disable it the tick stay, did you saw this? I reported this issue since the version with the previous feedback submitting mode, when you could simply send your issue from main menu.

[Honza]

> Yes, thanks, I thought it was removed from Firefox, but why it was removed from the main menu?

The "File -> Work Offline" menu action is still there, do you see it?

> Do you think that it would be useful to set Firefox to load cache pages automatically when offline by default instead of enabling offline mode manually?

Not sure if I understand this. When Firefox is offline pages are loaded from the cache.

> I reported this issue since the version with the previous feedback submitting mode, when you could simply send your issue from main menu.

Not sure if I understand this either. What do you mean by "feedback submitting mode"?

[Luca_Pavan]

@Honza , yes, jscher2000 told me and I can now still use it if I need it, but I'd surely like to be able to use webpages while offline without having to enable Offline mode, I think that Google Chrome already does by what I saw some time ago on another laptop. When I wrote previous submitting mode I meant the way Mozilla was receiving users feedbacks some years ago, where users could simply write a feedback and send it to Mozilla, without need to create a Bugzilla account.

[Honza]

> but I'd surely like to be able to use webpages while offline without having to enable Offline mode, 

I see, yes it makes sense and I agree, it'd be useful feature. We've been discussing this in the past and there are two bugzilla bugs you can follow. This feature is not currently on our DevTools roadmap, but if there is any progress, you'll see it in those bug reports:

Bug 1310986 - Expose "Work Offline" as a toggle in the devtools

Bug 1029203 - Emulate being offline

Honza

[Luca_Pavan]

Got it, thanks.