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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

51–60 of 158 posts

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

#51
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it’s basically a skin for Safari?

Not for long. Apple just started allowing 3rd party browser engines in the EU https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-ios-17-4-b...

Only in the EU because of that ruling. IIRC they are not implementing the requirement elsewhere (though they might eventually if the difference gets sufficient bad press or becomes technically inconvenient).

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

#53

Title implies that this article thirdly explains how to waste annoying sysadmins, which is an entertaining prospect. Are we talking about not putting annoying sysadmins to good use? Or are we talking about, you know, makin sure they don’t cause nobody no trouble again, boss?

[deleted]

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

#54
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

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)

A CDN caches across users, lowers latency by having servers closer to the user, and lowers the bandwidth your server needs to handle. Cloudflare CDN has a free tier and I assume others do, too, so it's fairly easy to provision.

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

#55
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 can easily have hundreds of Chrome tabs open, and none of this happens. I can have hundreds of tabs inadvertently open in iOS Safari, and none of this happens. Would you kindly refrain from blaming users for what clearly is a bug in the application?

Hell, I have hundreds of tabs open on firefox on my android phone, and none of this happens.

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

#57

I thought firefox on ios was just safari with a reskin because apple doesn't allow other browser engines on their phone? Firefox on android is amazing with its plugin support, though I still prefer their pre-2021 UI

Firefox on Android is NOT amazing. For MANY YEARS the user agent included the exact model of your phone. They seem to be incompetent. (Edit: this is a bit harsh, and to clarify, directed at the company and not any specific people in their employ.) Exactly what Google wants -- plausible deniability when it comes to monopoly, but an awful alternative.

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

#58
post #29
post #9

Oh hey, I wrote that last issue linked! What crazy Deja vu. Here’s me discovering the issue that led me to find some wild behavior. Basically Firefox loaded favicons 4x the number of tabs opened to that website. It would do this every time I opened or closed any tab. https://aggressivelyparaphrasing.me/2022/12/12/why-does-my-l... It was resolved a while back so maybe it’s similar symptoms but different root cause, or…

Wordpress handles 404s really slowly? I'm kind of surprised it works at all then, as at least in my logs there's a very steady stream of bots probing it for vulnerabilities by trying random URLs.

It may intentionally 404 slowly? One web service I worked on added a few hundred milliseconds delay in returning 404s to slow down this kind of probing attack

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

#59
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

Pretty weird to think that running a web server also means you should operate "a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers".

I also think it's pretty weird to defend thoroughly defect software with "waste ful, sure, but hardly that big a deal".

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

#60
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?

Not necessarily complex, but the tab switcher etc is built by Firefox, and probably is what tries to load the favicons to display the icon somewhere?
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