Comment 34 for bug 191889

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008032215 Minefield/3.0b5pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008032215 Minefield/3.0b5pre

On my Debian system, I had the NetworkManager service running, however, my wired network interface was controlled manually (in my case, the relevant entry in /etc/network/interfaces was "iface eth1 inet static", which prevents NetworkManager from managing that interface). Therefore, when using the wired interface, I had network access, however, NetworkManager reports no network devices present (the commandline program nm-tool yielded:

"
NetworkManager Tool

State: disconnected

print_devices(): didn't get a reply from NetworkManager.
There are no available network devices.
").

This caused Firefox 3 to startup in Offline mode, which forced me to manually uncheck File->Work Offline at the beginning of each session.

As a workaround, I now disable the NetworkManager service before starting Firefox (now nm-tool reports
"
NetworkManager Tool

get_nm_state(): didn't get a reply from NetworkManager.

NetworkManager appears not to be running (could not get its state).
").

If NetworkManager intends that it is accurately reporting the "online" status of the computer (does it? or does it intend to only report the state of the connections that it is managing?), then I suppose that NetworkManager has a bug.

However, in any case, Firefox should have a config option that the user can use to tell Firefox not to query NetworkManager upon startup.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install NetworkManager
2. Configure things so that NetworkManager does not control any of the active network interfaces (I believe you can do this by adding all of the active interfaces to /etc/network/interfaces, providing each of them with at least one option other than "auto" or "dhcp"). nm-tool should report state "disconnected", as described above.
3. Start Firefox. Observe that File->Work Offline is checked.
Actual Results:
File->Work Offline is checked

Expected Results:
I would expect that if I start Firefox when I am online (able to access remote web pages), and File->Work Offline was not checked at the end of my previous session, that File->Work Offline would not be checked upon startup

I have heard of other people having similar problems in slightly different circumstances (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/191889).

Since NetworkManager cannot currently be relied upon to accurately give the online status of the system, I am requesting an option that tells tell Firefox not to query NetworkManager upon startup. I could not find such an option at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Preferences.