Tom’s Extelopedia

Firefox 3 now has an “off-line mode”.  This seems to be part of a long-running effort to allow users to run web applications off-line, similar to Google Gears, and to be integrated with Google Gears somehow in the future.

Right now, however, this mode is a usability nightmare.  Basically, Firefox 3 can be in one of two states: off-line or on-line.  There is no clear visual difference between the two, and both seem to work the same.  But if you’re in off-line mode, many web sites can’t be accessed at all (even if the computer is on-line), and the ones that can be accessed show outdated web pages.  Basically, the effect of off-line mode is to break the browser in subtle ways.  Not surprisingly, this has led to numerous confused support requests on the web.  It’s difficult to comprehend how such a serious usability problem could have made it through any kind of Firefox testing.

The lessons we can draw from this are:

• pages loaded in off-line mode must be clearly identified as such, for example by putting a thick red frame around them or putting a big “off-line” logo on top of them or into the page background
• off-line mode should be active only when the computer is actually off-line
• off-line mode should only be active for sites where the user explicitly selects off-line mode
• Firefox needs to take usability more seriously and needs to do more user testing

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