Proposing Removal of the Offline Browser Startpage

[Matthew East]

Dear all,

It seems to me that the current offline startpage serves no useful
purpose. Essentially if users use firefox and are not connected to the
internet, ubufox shows them the offline startpage which is found at
file:///usr/share/ubuntu-artwork/home/index.html. That file has been
shipped in the ubuntu-docs package since Dapper. However, it seems to
me to be the wrong approach - when a user is not connected to the
internet and opens their browser, they shouldn't be shown a page that
looks like a web page, because it might confuse them into thinking
they are connected. What I believe they should see is information that
they are not connected to the internet. And that's what a browser will
always do if it tries to connect to a remote webpage and there is no
working internet connection.

So what it seems to me we should do is to configure browsers to point
at http://start.ubuntu.com/[Ubuntu version here]. If the user isn't
connected, they will see information which tells them that, which is
entirely appropriate in my opinion. If the "no internet connection"
page of any particular browser is too ugly or not user friendly, we
should file bugs about improving it.

What do people think?

I've discussed this idea in the past with asac and I believe that we
agree about it - but it strikes me as better to raise it for general
discussion in case I have missed any strong counter-arguments.

If there is broad agreement, I'd like to remove the offline browser
startpage from ubuntu-docs. Unfortunately, I'm going to need a little
help, because my knowledge of packaging isn't good enough to know how
to achieve this. Since Dapper, a system of alternatives has been put
in place for the offline startpage to allow derivatives to install
their own - documented here [1]. For that reason I'm not sure that
simply removing the files from ubuntu-docs (which I am capable of
doing on my own :p) will be sufficient. I'd love some guidance on how
to proceed with this.

Once that is achieved, the only remaining step is to configure all the
various browsers to point at the online startpage.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperFirefoxStartPageTranslation

I look forward to your thoughts.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF