Gnome, Network Manager, and Fire Fox/Ice Weasel 3 starting in Offline mode

19th July 2008

For some reason, my IW 3 is now starting in Offline mode each time, despite my attempts to remove that checkbox every time.

Update: as suggested by Donny Kurnia (based on the recent post by Hobgoblin), the simplest and the most correct way to fix the problem is to go to about:config and set toolkit.networkmanager.disable to true.

Below you will find other (worse and obsolete) solutions.

Little research had shown that the simplest solution is to disable Fire Fox’s/Ice Weasel’s feature to auto-detect if Internet connection is available: go to about:config, find browser.offline-apps.notify and set it to false. After this, Fire Fox/Ice Weasel 3 will no longer try to check if you have Internet connection. (this was wrong, and here is why: kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.offline-apps.notify)

However, this is not a good solution, because auto-detection generally improves user experience (e.g. by automatically using cached page versions for tabs open at startup). The actual reason (in many cases) is the network detection by the Network Manager - it reports “no connection” although connection is present (bug report).

The simple solution is to disable (or even remove) Network Manager.

Another simple solution (without disabling/removing Network Manager) is to disallow Network Manager to notify other desktop applications about the presence of the internet connection (slightly edited):

Open the terminal/konsole (Applications–>Accessories—>Terminal), and type gksudo gedit /etc/dbus-1/system.d/Network Manager.conf (note: path might differ for your Linux distribution - try locate Network Manager.conf). Then replace all lines

< allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/ > with < deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/ >

Save the changes and either reboot or just stop/kill/restart the running instance of Network Manager. This change will stop Network Manager from notifying Fire Fox/Ice Weasel and other desktop applications about the presence/absence of internet connection - and Fire Fox will no longer start in Offline mode.

(Thanks Nikitas350 from Ubuntu forums for this fix.)

Personally, I did what Nikitas350 suggested, and also removed the networkmanager-gnome package - I’m still able to add networkmanager-kde monitor to Gnome panel, if I want to (and for me, networkmanager-kde works properly).

The even better solution would be to make Network Manager detect the availability of connection properly. However, I did not dig deep enough to find how to do that - comments and better solutions are welcome.

One of the more complicated solutions (and still not a perfect one) was also found at Ubuntu forums (slightly edited for contextual clarity):

I am using USB modem to connect to internet and the Offline mode issue was also bothering me after upgrading to Firefox 3.

The solution I have found was: disable Network Applet from System -> Preferences -> Sessions, and add the following lines to the file “/etc/network/interfaces”:

auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp

Thus, I guess, Firefox believes that eth0 (i.e. ethernet card) is active, although Internet connection is established via ppp0 (i.e. USB modem).

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 16:48 and is filed under *nix, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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