Proposing Removal of the Offline Browser Startpage

[Matthew East]

Hi Steve,

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 6:14 PM, Steve Langasek
<steve.langasek at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 08:05:08AM +0100, Matthew East wrote:
>> 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?
>
> Is there any risk that this will cause a degraded experience for users who
> have a half-up network connection (unusually high latency causing delayed
> loading of the initial window, or wireless provider proxy pages causing
> confusing behavior on the default page)?  It's likely that the behavior will
> be the same with or without the ubufox mediation because these cases already
> get treated as "network up", but I think this question bears asking.

I don't know the answer to this - perhaps one of the ubufox developers
can comment on how ubufox deals with this. I suppose that other
browsers like epiphany or chromium don't have a similar fallback
mechanism and just keep trying to connect to the internet.

Even if the existence of the offline page is improving the experience
for such users, I would still imagine that how a browser handles this
situation is something that should still be internal to that browser,
rather than relying on an external package like ubuntu-docs to help.

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