Live Fedora start page proposal

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

If I use my system all the time with a network connection up that
doesn't work [1], can't I just go to the browser prefs and set the
default page to about:blank?

As always the first choice should be a solution that is most useful
for "most" people *and* works for everyone, rather than a pref, but I
think a pref is better than a solution that compromises the
common/expected case.

It really seems to me that when opening an Internet browser, the
common/expected case is that I'm on the Internet. Maybe I'm the only
person who opens the web browser in order to browse the web? :-P

Based on what blizzard said, we do have some real knowledge that lots
of people use the default search page in Firefox upstream, so we
aren't relying on theory alone to say that when someone opens a new
browser window lots of times they're looking to search.

Havoc

[1] there's no big problem with _offline_ afaik since the DNS fails
instantly, the problem is having a network interface up but it doesn't
work / has huge latency for some reason, and if the browser had a bug
maybe it would lock up in this case instead of letting you press stop.
I don't know if it really does this though.

It's (conceptually) easy to magically choose the web page if you are
online and the local page otherwise if by "online" we mean "you have a
network interface up" but if by "online" we mean "your internet
actually works" there's no way to query that without waiting for some
long timeout, afaik.

Assuming the browser does not hang if the network isn't working, then
the worst case behavior here doesn't seem catastrophic to me... it
will say "can't load start.fedoraproject.org" and then people will be
all "oh, I'm not on the Internet, that makes sense."