After my upgrade to hardy, firefox always starts with offline mode and it’s really hectic to keep change it back to online and refresh the each saved session tabs.
Also in parallel, I find my NM (network manager) applet showing status as not connected even though I connect by dhcp setting through dhcp-client.
After googling for some time, I understood that above too are inter-related. Firefox checks the nm status through d-bus and based on that it’ll change the mode while starting. Same is the case with pidgin, evolution and other internet based applications. So, issue lies with nm applet as it’s not showing the correct status even though I connect by dhcp config.
Finally, I figured out the fix for this.
I disabled roaming mode for wired connections from the Network manager and then enabled automatic configuration (DHCP) option. Now, everything started working. Firefox starts online mode now.
What a default config. Ubuntu release should have come by the proper default config atleast for very commonly used things like NM etc.
Also, I found that the issue not exists in earlier versions of firefox as well as NM. Also, by down-grading the kernel version fixed this. But, of all these, the above one is the easiest.