We should do... something... when the user is offline, on a non-functional network connection, or the Pocket servers are down. This bug is not about making Pocket content available offline, but rather how we handle these error/failure conditions. Presumably if we're trying to show a Pocket panel but one of these cases occurs, we should show an error message in the panel?

Michael: has this come up in UX discussions?

Justin: It hasn't, but a possible solution would be to reuse Firefox's "Failed to Connect" Messaging for the mentioned use cases. The messaging reads: Failed to Connect ------------------------------------- Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at "insert address". ------------------------------------- • Could the site be temporarily unavailable? Try again later. • Are you unable to browse other sites? Check the computer's network connection • Is your computer or network protected by a firewall or proxy? Incorrect settings can interfere with web browsing { Try Again } Need infoing Matej for copy recommendations. Matej, is there a more concise way to communicate this message in a doorhanger?

How much do we want or need to say about the reasons? It could be as simple as: Firefox can't currently connect to Pocket. Or with a little more info: Firefox can't connect to Pocket. There may be a problem with your connection or with their servers.

This will be resolved in bug 1163111 as it includes support for an error message during connection errors, offline state, and server problems.

I've tested the Pocket offline experience using: FF 38.0.5 OS: Win 7 x64, Mac Os X 10.9.5, Ubuntu 14.04 x86 and I found that if you are logged in to Pocket and try to save a new page while the internet connection is down this is the only error that you receive: Page Not Saved There was an error when trying to save to Pocket is this the entire error that we should receive? it doesn't seem to be clear that is a connection error.

Investigated this on the Pocket side: If the user switches on "Work Offline", then this case is handled correctly and the appropriate error message is shown. (See attached image) However, FF doesn't seem to properly detect the true offline state outside of "Work Offline" as noted in bug 654579. You can verify this by toggling your Internet off/on while on this page in Safari vs Firefox for example: http://html5demos.com/offline Outside of that, we also looked at the errors that come from the actual http request and couldn't find a specific value that would indicate this state over any other generic error state.

I've tested and you are correct Firefox doesn't detect correctly determine the offline state.

Network connectivity detection has not yet been enabled on desktop (it is on Android though). You could setting the network.manage-offline-status pref to true, and check for the expected behaviour. I will submit a patch in bug 654579 to enable it ASAP. Note: detection doesn't work on Linux at the moment.

(In reply to Valentin Gosu [:valentin] from comment #8) > You could setting the network.manage-offline-status pref to true, and check > for the expected behaviour. > I will submit a patch in bug 654579 to enable it ASAP. I don't think there's an urgent need for that, and we certainly should not uplift it to 38.0.5 for the initial Pocket release. Further, this isn't the right approach for this bug. At least in general. The main issue here is that there are a wide variety of failure modes that can cause network requests to fail. As a couple of trivial examples: a user could be nominally "online" but have a company firewall that blocks getpocket.com, or the user could be on an entirely normal&functional connection except that getpocket.com is down. It might be a nice value-add to have a more focused/explicit message for the cases bug 654579 covers, but we should make sure the UI can still correctly handle cases where the browser thinks you're "online" but Pocket API requests are not working. (The general solution here is to just to make sure we show UI (eg: spinner) to indicate there's pending activity when things are slow, and that errors/timeouts are correctly handled to show when things fail.)

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #9) > (The general solution here is to just to make sure we show UI (eg: spinner) > to indicate there's pending activity when things are slow, and that > errors/timeouts are correctly handled to show when things fail.) :Dolske - Given this approach (which I agree with) are there any remaining TODOs for this particular ticket? The code that landed in the Beta included error handling as you described: * Saving shows a spinner to indicate activity * On an error: ** We first see if it's an authentication error and if it is, display the Logged Out panel/prompt them to re-login ** See if we have an error message given from Pocket's API (for example, a maintenance message or a specific error state) ** See if there is an error message from the request's error object that we can display ** Failing all of that, use a generic message along the lines of "We couldn't save to Pocket"

(In reply to Nate Weiner from comment #10) > :Dolske - Given this approach (which I agree with) are there any remaining > TODOs for this particular ticket? The code that landed in the Beta included > error handling as you described: Ok, sounds good to me. This was originally filed as a bit of an investigation bug, so if it's already handled we're done. If there are specific problems found in testing/usage, new bugs can be filed.