Hopefully someone will give you a good answer later, meanwhile some ideas.

■ Firefox will go into offline mode if you do not have an internet connection, so allow your computer time to startup and establish an internet connection before you load and run firefox.

■ It may be something that is settable in your preferences config file,

• and so - I do not know ! - it may be possible to set this using "about:config"
• you will get a warning if you have not used about config before, do remember changes you then make have the potential to prevent firefox working.
• if you do venture into about config I would advise that you first of all set up a separate test profile, then if you mess up only a test profile stops working and your original is still useable

See MozillaZine-About:config andProfiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data

■ an easier way, which I would think, will set firefox to work online may be simply resetting preferences to default settings. That obviously could mean you loosing other changes that you have deliberately made see Reset Firefox preferences to troubleshoot and fix problems but is a much safer method.

While there also consider trying firefox in safe mod and without addons enabled in case they are causing the problem. Also note using Help -> Troubleshooting, will help you keep track of changes made in any profiles. (or "about:support")

PS

You may be interested in this article relating to offline/online status detection in Linux, :

"Firefox would incorrectly switch to offline mode. This resulted in Firefox starting up in offline mode even when a network connection was available.

To work around the problem, this preference allows users to disable offline status detection via NetworkManager. see "

Hello! Thank you a much! Your post was very helpful. Now all works correct.

King regards.

I haven't tested this, yet, but it looks like it should work. And, if it had come up when I did my original search, I wouldn't have had to ask the question in the first place.

The "solution" offered didn't work at all; I just restarted Firefox and it's still starting off-line.

Hi Sideburns,

I have not normally used Unix or Linux for a few years, but have just booted up into Ubuntu Lucid Linux. The default Firefox 3.6.18 installation with that distro worked as soon as I tried it. All I had to do was log in to my wifi connection.

If you have problems it is probably best to start your own thread by asking your own question.