Comment 316 for bug 191889

(In reply to comment #116)
> What is the benefit of doing this automatically?

It's very convenient when a machine loses or acquires network access often.

> I think most people are always online and therefore don't want firefox to go
> to offline mode silently.

Not true at all. Mobile people with laptops frequently transition between online and offline. It's stupid to have to manually tell Firefox when this is happening when the system already knows.

> Loosing connection is usually unintentionally and
> shouldn't be punished by reloading all pages etc.

We don't reload all pages when changing online/offline state.

> I think it is irrelevant, whether you ARE online (or don't), but instead it is
> relevant if you WANT to be online (or don't).
> I assume, network-manager doesn't tell your intention but only tells the
> current online state, intentionally or not.

An application that can either work locally or contact a server, such as an offline-enabled Web email application, needs to know whether you ARE online, not whether you WANT to be online, in order to choose the best strategy for saving email, for example. The same goes for Firefox choosing whether to try to load pages or just get them from the cache. Knowing whether you "want" to be online is not useful at all.