Spencer – I think the “The world is not US” in my comment was brought in to highlight the point, that software vendors like Microsoft and Mozilla need to consider non-US crowd as well.
Having spent a lot of work time in both US and India I’m able to see around that statistic, but Microsoft / Mozialla cannot build software based on that statistic.
We’re just having a healthy discussion here. No-one is narrow-sighted. 
Because, I guess, lots of people live outside the US as well.
Rondolpho, I did exactly that.
In the past, I downloaded (at school) all the pages I needed to a USB drive. Then I viewed them at home.
Now, with high-speed at home, I launch windows to all the sites I need before leaving for the train. Then, I switch to offline and read the pages.
I use a local-hosted wiki as a PIM – gotta use the browser to navigate.
Now, accessing my local Apache server - is that consider online or offline?
Prior to this, I used a TiddlyWiki – which is just a locally-saved file (USB or otherwise) and is definitely an offline browser usage.
Off line mode was good after earthquake meant no downloads for 1 month later.
37signals take on this:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/347-youre-not-on-a-fucking-plane-and-if-you-are-it-doesnt-matter
I agree.
The function Working off-line is not necessarily futile.
My internet explorer was hacked by installing improper softwares and that the working off-line function in the internet explorer prevents the spy-wares in my computer to communicate to the remote server, or to spam adult web-pages.
Micro-xxxx is quite stupid enough to design internet explorer because it can be hacked very easily but its smart enough to create a working off-line function
The work offline facility on my pc is not there…How do I add it to my file options?
ok, I know that it is under the file list but also shows up under that wheel that showed up on my tool bar. What I can not figure out is why my computer keeps checking the work offline. It is really pain when it happens fifteen or twenty times an hour. So if someone out there can tell me how to fix it I would really appricate it.
cybergran
i cant get on to check my mail it tells me that i am working off line
some times i couldent get on for days ,and if i ever get on i will be checking my mail and it will knock off and say that i am working off
line ,i would like for this to be fixed,
and i have a problem with this to it says there is a problem with
this websites security certificate,
the secrtificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet
valild
security certifity problems may indicate an attempt to fool you ar
intercept any data you send to the server
we reecommed that you close this webpage,
and do not continue to to this webpage
now when this comes up i cant get on my email page
is there a way to fix this mess thank you lois young
i had good luck i got on but it could change
I use Opera most of the time, when I need firefox for one reason or another its a right pain in the bum to have to play jiggery-pokery just to load up a page. Which is why im here googling it…
I do a lot of web development on stand-alone computers, so it’s very annoying that Firefox can’t connect to http://localhost/ when Offline mode is enabled. I got so fed up that I made an extension that forces it to be in online mode regardless of the network connection.
For a web browser? Eh, probably not so much. For other applications? Yeah, you can and should plan for it. Case in point: Valve Software’s Steam.
For those of you who don’t play video games, Valve’s the company that made Half-Life and Half-Life 2, two well-regarded first-person shooters (but so far not responsible for any Columbine-esque hijinks). They released their own digital authentication and distribution system called Steam: you can buy the games in the store, but you can’t actually play them until you get online and authenticate yourself (and download some keys to unlock the game) and this is a sore point: when you try to get on, it’s going to force an update of the underlying Steam software and try to pull down the latest and greatest patches and if you’re on dial-up and all you wanted to do was play your shiny new game, tough luck. If you’re on broadband and you wanted to play a single-player game because the cable’s out, tough luck: offline mode’s a giant crapshoot. One of the fixes for offline mode not working was, I kid you not, disabling your network card.
As a broadband user, I sort of scoffed at both of these as they “don’t apply to me.” Over the holidays, I was building my new machine up and got to the point where it was time to install all my software on to my box. I was finally actually kind of excited for Steam - hey look, I don’t have to dig out my install media or go hunting through the internets for patches where I’m invariably going to have to click through 18 shock the monkey links before I find out that their server’s full or they finally can throw a file not found error at me!
Except that my build coincided with the power outages in Seattle and winning game of the year doesn’t mean that you built out a redundant, geographically disparate, network architecture (where’s the call for an OSI Layer 1 offline mode?). I still don’t know how Half-Life 2 runs on my new machine, but Far Cry is awful pretty.
Using a web browser without an internet connection does seem ludicrous. Of course, there are many cases where you wouldn’t keep a machine connected to the internet (file and database servers, DAWs, that sort of thing).
I don’t think it’s such a hot idea for programmers to implicitly assume that their target environment will have an internet connection (unless of course that’s the point of the application!). There’s nothing wrong with having features that don’t work without one; users expect that. But if some app that’s totally unrelated to the web - let’s say hypothetically, Microsoft Word - were to become completely crippled without internet connectivity, that would be incredibly bad.
This is one of the things I hate about the SPP; near as I can tell it implicitly assumes an internet connection, and any application that uses this framework will eventually become crippled without one, even if it’s a totally “offline” app in every other sense.
Offline mode is still useful, but it depends on the application. Say for example your a Sales Rep giving a presentation to a doctor on a particular drug at his/her office. Your going to work offline then. When you finish for the day, you might connect (in your hotel room or at your house) and synchronize you data while online.
I think your overemphasizing the importance of the web.
“For a lot of computer users, their computer is an overpriced paperweight if it doesn’t have an Internet connection.”
I think if the only thing you use your computer for is for internet related activies, then you probably paid a lot of money for essentially browsing, uploading, and downloading content. The “computer” in this case is merely a multimedia storage device.
It is a shame that the computer has been relagated to this task for the masses.
I agree with others that having a visible user setting controlling online/offline status for an app is silly. Some apps do need to behave differently without network access, but it seems a pretty rare situation that this is something the user would need to select, instead of the app just asking the OS.
Urm…So, basically, your argument is that almost everybody has a connection to the internet that is fast, perpetually on and so on.Therefore you say that an offline mode is unnecessary but just take a moment to think about us unfornates in ‘developing’ countries like India. We here struggle with low speed dial-up connections (I am luckier than most having a 256 Kbps ADSl limited bandwidth connection) and if suppose I have to view a web page that I opened in my browser ,say today morning, I just select Offline mode and open the browser history. If that were not available, I’d have to re-download that page all over again and waste precious bandwidth…One teeny web page doesn’t sound like much but the usage adds up.
By the way, I take offence at the way you mention Firefox and IE in your post but entirely ignore Opera… ;D
The Offline Mode is still useful if you have a lot of opened tabs. Each time browser starts all these tabs drain the Internet and other resources.
http://web-citizen.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-still-use-work-offline-mode-in.html