Comment 306 for bug 191889

I agree with Steve that applications should use (established!) protocols and standards to talk to the OS. They shouldn't try to rely on software which is far from a stable and complete state. INstead they should use the right level of protocols.

Network manager is just a tool, to ease connecting to the outside world, but it is much too high level to get a reliable statement from it if a connection to some sites is possible or not.

If NM controls the default route, it is even possible to connect to some sites via non-default routes, e.g. to allow only some sites for children etc.

So IMHO asking NM is wrong.

I think to detect complete isolation from outer network you can only ask the same level of APIs you are using to communicate.
If NM would ask this same low level API it might be reasonable to ask NM instead, but you should have a guaranty that it does work this way.

I strongly believe that automatisms should be nearly perfect and well tested before you drop them as a default on users. Especially if they cannot be disabled. Microsoft has often made this mistake and I have already spent a lot of time to these kind of problems. I don't want to see this behaviour in linux.

I am mainly using linux, because I don't want to be forced to do things the way the producer thinks. I am probably not in mainstream, so this is very important for me.

As someone else already wrote, FF3 makes an automatic decision about the offline state and overrides the user's choice. I don't think it is even necessary to have this automatic behaviour.

Instead FF3 could ask the user if he wants to go offline, when a minimum count of connection attempts failed. Then a user gets the chance to correct the network state before continuing. This way he doesn't need to reload all those tabs, just because the network fails for a moment. Also, if there are tabs which failed to load and the user disables offline mode, FF3 could reload those tabs itself (or ask before).