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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

121–130 of 158 posts

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

#121
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's fine, but that is moving the goalposts. GP said that Firefox is so good on Android because it's important to have ad blocking, and Brave meets that need just fine.

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

#122

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

iOS requires a browser to use the OS-provided WebKit, but you can still use your own networking layer, and doing your own scripts injection (e.g. for extensions, like what Orion is doing). Firefox for iOS used to use Alamofire as its networking engine, but switched over to NSURLSession/URLSession at some point. Chrome for iOS uses Cronet which was extracted from Chromium's networking stack (or maybe used, I have not followed the development recently).

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

#123
post #99
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 has similar anti-privacy/adtech built in

They even market it: https://brave.com/brave-ads/

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

#124

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.

You've been downvoted but I would like to echo this comment. I use Firefox mobile daily, I occasionally have to switch to Chrome for some things. I choose to continue using Firefox Android because of the ability for greater privacy. Firefox android is slow and buggy. It is especially terrible if you are not in the habit of closing open tabs and just open new ones. As a concrete example, it often seems to run out of m…

It's just par for the course for Firefox users to deny any problems with the browser and blame it all on Google. Not to mention the history revisionism on why Chrome beat Firefox. I was a huge Firefox fan with a heavily customized browser and then Mozilla removed everything. The biggest enemy of Firefox is not Google, it's Mozilla and their incompetent leadership. They need to focus on their Android browser ans invest heavily because that's where the biggest user base is. I don't want them to abandon Gecko, but it's clear that Mozilla can't keep up.

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

#125
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.

What's the user visible tradeoff between "an average page is so laden with advertising and tracking nonsense that it loads slowly and is covered with crap, but that crap all renders real fast" vs "JS renders at 1/10th the speed but only the stuff you want to look at?"

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

#126
post #75
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.

Absolutely. I was an Android user for years and got an iPhone as a gift in 2022. On Android, I used Firefox with uBlock Origin. Mobile web browsing is not the best experience regardless, but that made it tolerable.

The worst thing about the iPhone is the web browsing experience in Safari. It's awful. The ads totally ruin it. The rest of the phone is fine, I still prefer Android but that's most likely just because it's what I started with.

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

#128

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…

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/

You clearly did not understand that woman's point.

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

#129
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

Bad take.

I opened the Github issue linked. For us it represented, at times, thousands of requests per second across multiple users. And that was with affected users getting IP-banned temporarily.

Some of which were 404s which you typically absolutely do not want cached. Or 405s (on HEAD /favicon.ico for example). Or 429s. Or 403s.

Browsers are expected to: 1. Use the favicon specified in meta if any (we do have one, /favicon.svg) 2. Respect cache headers (immutable + multi-months max-age) 3. Not make completely random requests to things they should ignore (such as OpenGraph tags)

Yes CDNs do help with these kinds of issues, but they absolutely do not fix them all. Which is why even though we have a pretty damn elaborate setup in that regard we were being annoyed by the issue.

But also Firefox on iOS should be not-completely-broken.

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

#130
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 author obfuscates her employers. Stuff she discovers as an end user will get named.
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