> updates, telemetry, certificate management, crash reporting and other similar functionality
We can discuss about the importance of telemetry, but the others seem quite important to me.
The key is just to gracefully fail when something goes wrong (and there it didn't).
Does it mean that the same blocking bug could happen while browse a local website on an air-gapped network? Or while opening local HTML files while offline?
So yes, you can use Firefox in any offline environment.
> the client was hanging inside a network request to one of the Firefox internal services.
Presuming that while offline, there is no pending network request to hang on, yes, it would have worked if you were offline.
This is the part that really gets me. For an average user, they trust the certificate that is bundled with the browser vendor (yes you can do certificate pinning). It just seems like something like certificate for encryption, ought to be split up away from browser vendor rather managed by a open public repo mange by a non-profit. Or have it on a block chain type of ledger. Any thoughts on that HN?
None of them are; disconnect from internet and start Firefox. It will work.
It was just a bug in the Firefox HTTP 3 implementation that caused it to be rendered unusable; it just so happens that connecting to these services triggered it, but it also could have been triggered by another HTTP 3 service (as I understand it, anyway).
If you're making an HTTP/3.0 request formed "correctly" then yes, it too would cause the infinite loop. It's not in any way specific to the internal service.