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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

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

#81

Post by yosefk »

smolder wrote: post #72
yosefk wrote: 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

> Wasteful, sure, but hardly that big a deal This attitude is why so much software is garbage, and why people with limited connections or hardware can't have a good time on the internet.

In this case, using a CDN in front of the server is the thing which would improve things for people with limited bw/hw more quickly and to a greater extent than counting the fetches by Firefox on iOS and calling it out for fetching too much

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

#82

Post by chithanh »

Aardwolf wrote: post #56

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, it is on the contrary quite annoying and has gotten more so over the years

* Tabs get stuck frequently, and can only be revived by closing, then undoing close.

* Can no longer access about:config in release builds

* Bookmarks got demoted in favor of Pocket, can no longer set bookmarks as default home page

* URL autocompletion got dumbed down, first on mobile and then also on desktop

* etc.

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

#83

Post by vorticalbox »

smolder wrote: post #57
Aardwolf wrote: post #56

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.

There is also this issue

To address this, we will measure Telemetry Coverage, which is the percentage of all Firefox users who report telemetry. The Telemetry Coverage measurement will sample a portion of all Firefox clients and report whether telemetry is enabled. This measurement will not include a client identifier and will not be associated with our standard telemetry.

Even if you turn telemetry off it will still call home

https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri...

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

#84

Post by sunaookami »

bu7jjuj wrote: post #75
smolder wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox on android can run ublock origin. The internet is unusable on mobile otherwise. But go on and let google continue to 'wow'you with their amazing ad tech. Firefox on android IS AMAZING.

No it's not. It's slow and buggy. You can also use an adblocking DNS like AdGuard and have adblocking system-wide. Yes I know uBlock blocks a bit better but DNS-blocking suffices. Also, there are other browsers with integrated adblockers based on Chromium.

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

#85

Post by loufe »

Aardwolf wrote: post #56

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

Given the seriously negative sibling comments, I thought I'd weigh in with my own experience. I'm unaware of anything behind the scenes, but I've always enjoyed the user experience in Firefox on Android, at least for the last couple years before the rewrite. I don't like browsing the web on my phone, but it's made it bearable.

I can't speak to the problems behind the scenes though, and they certainly merit attention.

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

#86

Post by erinaceousjones »

sunaookami wrote: post #84
bu7jjuj wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on android can run ublock origin. The internet is unusable on mobile otherwise. But go on and let google continue to 'wow'you with their amazing ad tech. Firefox on android IS AMAZING.

No it's not. It's slow and buggy. You can also use an adblocking DNS like AdGuard and have adblocking system-wide. Yes I know uBlock blocks a bit better but DNS-blocking suffices. Also, there are other browsers with integrated adblockers based on Chromium.

Not ever had Firefox for android be slow and buggy for myself! I've been using it in place of chrome on my phone for a good year. Honestly everyone keeps talking about how FF is "slow and buggy" and it has NEVER given me issue :/ why is my subjective experience so different to your subjective experience?

Meanwhile chrome/chromium is the one which is most likely to cause me GPU driver crashes, but that's because I use it for fun VR and "let's see how big I can make textures" experiments. Generally it manages a higher frame rate than FF in that context with stability as tradeoff.

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

#87

Post by klabb3 »

pjmlp wrote: post #68
globular-toast wrote: post #15

This isn't a very constructive post. Are we supposed to believe this is the only inefficient and buggy software out there? Seems weird to call out a particular project like that.

I for one, have no patience for Feel Good culture.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Fell Good culture, is in fact, toxic positivity/Feel Good culture, or as I've recently taken to calling it, toxic positivity plus Feel Good culture.

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

#88

Post by pohuing »

erinaceousjones wrote: post #86
sunaookami wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. It's slow and buggy. You can also use an adblocking DNS like AdGuard and have adblocking system-wide. Yes I know uBlock blocks a bit better but DNS-blocking suffices. Also, there are other browsers with integrated adblockers based on Chromium.

Not ever had Firefox for android be slow and buggy for myself! I've been using it in place of chrome on my phone for a good year. Honestly everyone keeps talking about how FF is "slow and buggy" and it has NEVER given me issue :/ why is my subjective experience so different to your subjective experience? Meanwhile chrome/chromium is the one which is most likely to cause me GPU driver crashes, but that's because I use…

There could just be a difference in hardware. I'm a Firefox user but there is a noticeable difference, just not one that matters much on a top tier soc

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

#89

Post by erinaceousjones »

chithanh wrote: post #82
Aardwolf wrote: post #56

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, it is on the contrary quite annoying and has gotten more so over the years * Tabs get stuck frequently, and can only be revived by closing, then undoing close. * Can no longer access about:config in release builds * Bookmarks got demoted in favor of Pocket, can no longer set bookmarks as default home page * URL autocompletion got dumbed down, first on mobile and then also on desktop…

My experience with Firefox Nightly for ~1 year below. Ironically, the nightly sounds more consistently stable than the current release build then!:

* Never had this tabs problem

* I can see about:config

* Bookmarks are fine and there's no mention of Pocket. Bookmarks show up ON the homepage, but yeah not being able to set a bookmark / any URL AS a homepage is a bit of an annoying feature lack

* URL completion works as I expect it to, although it does bug me how it strips the protocol from the URL so I have to manually type in `http://` for plaintext sites even when I've visited them before; depending on who you ask that is considered a "security feature" but kinda annoying. Other than that, I start typing in a URL and it shows me suggestions from my history followed by option to use my preferred search engine to search it.

All in all, I've not really felt FF (even nightly) be particularly different or unstable to using chrome.

Second comment I've made in this thread where I'm replying (ever so helpfully) "Huh, but it works for me" so I'll stop now :-). I promise the Mozilla Foundation aren't bribing nor blackmailing me.

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

#90

Post by butterNaN »

Aardwolf wrote: post #56

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 a godsend to me, and the secret is that I can install uBlock origin and noscript on my mobile. I get a whiplash when I see someone else browsing the web without these, it is absurd how much attention people will allow to be just stolen away.
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