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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

111–120 of 158 posts

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

#111
post #92
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.

Honestly Twitter has become a downright hostile browsing experience on any browser and any hardware. It's probably on purpose to make you use the app.

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

#113
> And yet, this thing decides to beat the shit out of the web server while trying to get it.

This is an exhorbitant exaggeration. They are duplicated requests for a favicon. Not only is that a tiny resource, most of these requests are 404ing which is cheap. And even if it isn't 404, your favicon is a tiny static asset, it should either be served by CDN or in the server's filesystem cache anyways.

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

#114

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…

Pocket is the worst. It tried to get me to read some article where the author was whinging that her daughter was pretty and people were complementing her as such.

https://time.com/6990734/ugly-side-of-pretty-essay/

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

#116

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

I'm another who loves firefox on android. It annoys me that to some degree Android forces chrome on you, even if firefox is set as your default. The full plugin support that got added in the last year really took it up a notch too.

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

#117
post #112

The author of this site usually takes pains to obfuscate whatever big commercial entity she's talking about who did dumb stuff. But when it's Firefox, she names names. Huh.

No - as someone who reads her on feed - not particularly, and only in certain cases.

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

#118
post #112

The author of this site usually takes pains to obfuscate whatever big commercial entity she's talking about who did dumb stuff. But when it's Firefox, she names names. Huh.

The post would be pointless if it didn't identify the browser in question.

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

#119
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You would want a CDN anyway to cache data across users, on servers close to those users, cutting the time & energy spent to serve the data.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the url is server.com/users/jsmith/hobbies/fun/photography.html then how many directories should be probed for a favicon?

Is that also the correct behavior for trying to identify a favicon for something like docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/org/xml/sax/helpers/DefaultHandler.html

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