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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

31–40 of 158 posts

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#31

It's not part of individual directories. That would be stupid. Having a path-specific favicon actually sounds like a feature.

> Having a path-specific favicon actually sounds like a feature. Can you provide at least a couple of use-cases for a path specific favicons?

Sites where users each get a directory for their profile.

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#33
post #28
post #8

It's an open source project, with a good discussion of the technical issues on GitHub[1]. Probably linked to certain user behaviors, like having hundreds of tabs open, but surely also contingent on the complexity of wedging a browser in iOS. Like maneuvering an excavator into a sandbox. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113

I also wonder how these requests "beat the shit out of the web server." It's requesting the feed and the favicon, both of which could be cached by a CDN. Even if they aren't, how much traffic are you gonna see from this compared to some other page trending on HN? Wasteful, sure, but hardly that big a deal

404s don't get cached. At least I don't configure anything to cache them.

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought all browsers on iOS were using the apple browser engine and ditto for Android. That is, they are just skins

They are using the WebKit rendering engine, but there’s a lot more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. They aren’t just skins.

Could you add a more to that? What other complex parts are built by FF?

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wonder how these requests "beat the shit out of the web server." It's requesting the feed and the favicon, both of which could be cached by a CDN. Even if they aren't, how much traffic are you gonna see from this compared to some other page trending on HN? Wasteful, sure, but hardly that big a deal

404s don't get cached. At least I don't configure anything to cache them.

404s have got to be very cheap to serve

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#36
post #28
post #8

It's an open source project, with a good discussion of the technical issues on GitHub[1]. Probably linked to certain user behaviors, like having hundreds of tabs open, but surely also contingent on the complexity of wedging a browser in iOS. Like maneuvering an excavator into a sandbox. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113

I also wonder how these requests "beat the shit out of the web server." It's requesting the feed and the favicon, both of which could be cached by a CDN. Even if they aren't, how much traffic are you gonna see from this compared to some other page trending on HN? Wasteful, sure, but hardly that big a deal

Why should you need to provision a CDN when If-Modified-Since / Etags exist?

I get that not every client is well behaved, but you'd hope that Firefox would be, given Mozilla's presence in web standards.

(Which, tbh makes me think this issue is the "on iOS" bit, given it's Firefox. I presume Apple still has their "only Safari's rendering engine" rule in place for... ...reasons)

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using the WebKit rendering engine, but there’s a lot more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. They aren’t just skins.

Could you add a more to that? What other complex parts are built by FF?

What do you think is complex?

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#39
post #5

Interesting. From a user experience, Firefox for iPhone has been a really excellent app, it’s been my preferred browser for years.

Even if it’s basically a skin for Safari?

Is it?

I thought it was basically Firefox with another HTML rendering engine (and I guess javascript runtime).

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