The webbook comes with the very very latest version of the Firefox web browser, version 3.0. This is a great broswer, but one of it’s fancy new features is a little less than helpful. Firefox can be put into “offline mode”, when in offline mode it won’t try to connect to websites, it will just display web pages stored in the cache. Pretty handy in principal, and this feature has been about for a while. The “great” new feature is that Firefox communicates with the network manager and can now detect when you are connected to the network with a wired or wifi connection. When you are not connected it automatically flips into offline mode. Still sounds like a good feature doesn’t it? Well the downside is that when you are connected to the internet on a 3G dongle (which is kind of the whole point of the webbook) Firefox has a chat with the network manager that goes a bit like this:
FF: “Hey, Network Manager, my user requested a page, am I connected to a wired network?”
NM: “nope, I have no wires plugged in”
FF: “how about wireless? Near any hotspots?”
NM: “nope, not associated with any hotspot right now.”
FF: “OK, I will go to offline mode”
The fact that there is a perfectly good mobile broadband connection sitting there online never comes into the conversation as the mobile broadband bit isn’t the responsibility of the network manager.
So how do we deal with this? Well we really really wanted to fix this before releasing the webbook, but all the fixes we found had nasty side effects that we couldn’t live with and a proper fix was promised in Firefox 3.0.1. Fortunately Firefox 3.0.1 was released to the Ubuntu repositories just a couple of days ago, so if you have done an automatic update recently you should have Firefox 3.0.1. Check by going to Help-About Mozilla Firefox and you should see the version number 3.0.1. If you still have 3.0 then look at the top of the screen for the red “updates available” icon. Click it and follow the prompts to install the available updates.
you might have to restart the webbook, or at least restart Firefox to get the update to take effect.
So now you have the updated firefox, that still doesn’t quite fix the problem. Firefox now has the ability to ignore the network manager, but we still need to tell it to do so. In the URL bar type “about:config”.
If Carlsberg made warning messages they would be like the Firefox one:
So if you promise to be careful, you will see a huge list of settings you can tweak. The one we are interested in is called toolkit.networkmanager.disable. To find this without scrolling through the big list just type “tool” in the filter box and the setting will leap into view.
Double click the setting and it will turn bold (to show it isn’t the default setting) and the value will change from false to true.
Now when you start Firefox with the broadband dongle connected you won’t have to turn off offline mode any more.