The Site With the Lamp

September 12, 2008

Firefox 3 on Fedora 9 has the annoying habit of starting in offline mode. You ought to be able to make it start in online mode by setting browser.offline to false in about:config - that doesn't work.

Then I read that you can fix it by setting browser.offline-apps.notify to false - that didn't work either.

The same article goes onto state that removing NetworkManager should do the trick - I didn't do anything so drastic but simply stopped it. That seems to have done the trick.

This is most annoying but I haven't worried too much about it because my computer hardly ever shuts down (or firefox closed). But that changed today thanks to three power failures. And on each restart firefox was in offline mode.

Some folks have been so frustrated by it that they were driven to write firefox extensions to disable offline mode. all together. Interestingly Fedora is not the only distribution with this problem, according to the forums it's present in many others including Ubuntu but didn't notice many references to Debian.