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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

#101

Post by oldmariner »

erinaceousjones wrote: post #89
chithanh wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I don't remember seeing Pocket, so I went back to the settings to look. There's an option to have "Thought-provoking stories" which in smaller text says "Powered by Pocket".

Considering I didn't even realize it said Pocket the first time around, I think bookmarks are more prominent over Pocket, so I don't see bookmarks being demoted in favor of Pocket.

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

#102

Post by chiph »

yosefk wrote: post #35
fnord123 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

404s have got to be very cheap to serve

Not when you're on a metered connection, or on a high latency one.

Don't make your customers pay for your sloppy habits is a good policy to have.

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

#103

Post by JimDabell »

fnord123 wrote: post #33
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

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

> A 404 response is cacheable by default; i.e., unless otherwise indicated by the method definition or explicit cache controls

— https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.4

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

#104

Post by theshrike79 »

maeil wrote: post #99
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.

There's Brave on Android fwiw.

Brave is still just a fancy Chromium reskin, I'll use any other engine than Chrome if it's even remotely possible

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

#105

Post by JimDabell »

ctxc wrote: post #34
JimDabell wrote: post #20

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?

Why the “complex” qualifier? The code responsible for the incorrect favicon URL bug is very simple, and part of the Firefox codebase not WebKit:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/blob/bd589c194...

Firefox on iOS has about 200k lines of Swift. As a rough rule of thumb, everything that isn’t directly related to rendering something within the page or executing JavaScript is Firefox code not WebKit code. So bookmarks, syncing, tabs, etc.

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

#106

Post by theshrike79 »

yosefk wrote: post #81
smolder wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

But if clients were considerate, we wouldn't need to waste electricity and work hours to run CDNs?

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

#107

Post by onli »

jakub_g wrote: post #92
pohuing wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Loading JS heavy pages like Twitter on Firefox Android is way slower than Chromium based. Very noticeable on 2019 hardware, less so but still on 2022 hardware.

That hasn't been my experience at all. It was Firefox that made web browsing bearable again on my old android device.

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

#108

Post by csande17 »

oldmariner wrote: post #101
erinaceousjones wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I don't remember seeing Pocket, so I went back to the settings to look. There's an option to have "Thought-provoking stories" which in smaller text says "Powered by Pocket". Considering I didn't even realize it said Pocket the first time around, I think bookmarks are more prominent over Pocket, so I don't see bookmarks being demoted in favor of Pocket.

For a while, bookmarks were demoted in favor of Collections, a jankier version of bookmarks that didn't sync properly to desktop and included a button to open all of them at once in multiple tabs.

Collections are still there, but they've made it easier to use regular bookmarks too, so now Firefox for Android just has two versions of bookmarks in it for some reason.

Entirely unrelated to Pocket, as far as I know, except in the general sense of Mozilla having bad ideas related to bookmarks.

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

#109

Post by thequux »

pohuing wrote: post #88
erinaceousjones wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use Firefox on a ~2020 era Android, and not even a particularly great one at that. Works fine for me aside from a very few badly written sites, and certainly not any shower than chrome.

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

#110

Post by Ylpertnodi »

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.

>...directed at the company and not any specific people in their employ.

They are the same thing, until you get to the upper levels, that own the place ie 'take full responsibility'. We are fa-mily. Until the shit hits the fan.

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