How to detect online/offline event cross-browser?

Question

I'm trying to accurately detect when the browser goes offline, using the HTML5 online and offline events.

Here's my code:

<script>
    // FIREFOX
    $(window).bind("online", applicationBackOnline); 
    $(window).bind("offline", applicationOffline);

    //IE
    window.onload = function() {
        document.body.ononline = IeConnectionEvent;
        document.body.onoffline = IeConnectionEvent;
    } 
</script>

It works fine when I just hit "Work offline" on either Firefox or IE, but it's kind of randomly working when I actually unplug the wire.

What's the best way to detect this change? I'd like to avoid repeating ajax calls with timeouts.

Answer 1

navigator.onLine is a mess

I face this when trying to make an ajax call to the server.

There are several possible situations when the client is offline:

• the ajax call timouts and you receive error
• the ajax call returns success, but the msg is null
• the ajax call is not executed because browser decides so (may be this is when navigator.onLine becomes false after a while)

The solution I am using is to control the status myself with javascript. I set the condition of a successful call, in any other case I assume the client is offline. Something like this:

var offline;
pendingItems.push(item);//add another item for processing
updatePendingInterval = setInterval("tryUpdatePending()",30000);
tryUpdatePending();

    function tryUpdatePending() {

        offline = setTimeout("$('#offline').show()", 10000);
        $.ajax({ data: JSON.stringify({ items: pendingItems }), url: "WebMethods.aspx/UpdatePendingItems", type: "POST", dataType: "json", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
          success: function (msg) {
            if ((!msg) || msg.d != "ok")
              return;
            pending = new Array(); //empty the pending array
            $('#offline').hide();
            clearTimeout(offline);
            clearInterval(updatePendingInterval);
          }
        });
      }

Answer 2

The browser vendors cannot agree on how to define offline. Some browsers have a Work Offline feature, which they consider separate to a lack of network access, which again is different to internet access. The whole thing is a mess. Some browser vendors update the navigator.onLine flag when actual network access is lost, others don't.

From the spec:

Returns false if the user agent is definitely offline (disconnected from the network). Returns true if the user agent might be online.

The events online and offline are fired when the value of this attribute changes.

The navigator.onLine attribute must return false if the user agent will not contact the network when the user follows links or when a script requests a remote page (or knows that such an attempt would fail), and must return true otherwise.

Finally, the spec notes:

This attribute is inherently unreliable. A computer can be connected to a network without having Internet access.

Answer 3

The best way which works now on all Major Browsers is the following Script:

(function () {
    var displayOnlineStatus = document.getElementById("online-status"),
        isOnline = function () {
            displayOnlineStatus.innerHTML = "Online";
            displayOnlineStatus.className = "online";
        },
        isOffline = function () {
            displayOnlineStatus.innerHTML = "Offline";
            displayOnlineStatus.className = "offline";
        };

    if (window.addEventListener) {
        /*
            Works well in Firefox and Opera with the 
            Work Offline option in the File menu.
            Pulling the ethernet cable doesn't seem to trigger it.
            Later Google Chrome and Safari seem to trigger it well
        */
        window.addEventListener("online", isOnline, false);
        window.addEventListener("offline", isOffline, false);
    }
    else {
        /*
            Works in IE with the Work Offline option in the 
            File menu and pulling the ethernet cable
        */
        document.body.ononline = isOnline;
        document.body.onoffline = isOffline;
    }
})();

Source: http://robertnyman.com/html5/offline/online-offline-events.html