The patch in bug 766616 handles offline mode, I think.

(In reply to :Gavin Sharp (use gavin@gavinsharp.com for email) from comment #1) > The patch in bug 766616 handles offline mode, I think. I'm thinking about the case where you've started fx, the provider is loaded fine and working, and you turn on offline mode. When I do this, I still have my sidebar. I can open chats (though I get an error page in them), flyouts and status panels all "seem" to work until you do something that requires http access. I think the UX for this should be disabling social, unless we know somehow that the provider supports offline mode.

If this is easy, we should target 17. If not, I don't think we should spend our limited resources on this until follow-up releases. The number of people who use off-line mode is small and the failure case isn't catastrophic.

I think that bug 766616 will improve the UX in the failure case, so it can be dealt with in 19 or 20.

Note that the motown icon won't display if the browser is not 'online', causing an empty toolbarbutton.

Until support for offline mode, or complete sidebar disabling, is implemented, the user should at least be logged out of Facebook in the sidebar when entering offline mode. This is what's happening in the current beta build: (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0 Build ID: 20121031065642) STR: 1. STR: 1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/about/messenger-for-firefox and click Turn On. 2. Log into Facebook. 3. Start Offline mode. 4. Open a chat panel for anyone in the SocialAPI sidebar. 5. Write some messages in the opened panel and try to send them. 6. Move back to online mode and try to send some more messages. The user is not announced in any way that SocialAPI is not usable while in offline mode. SocialAPI stays in offline mode until restarting Firefox. None of the messages from steps 5 or 6 were ever received.

The primary problem here is that the provider did not address offline mode. Their current chat windows do, but they are currently not working with socialapi. The suggestion of logging users out wont work, since that is not under our control. Given an absence of complaints about this issue in general, I'm going to wontfix it.