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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

151–158 of 158 posts

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

#151

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…

> Bookmarks show up ON the homepage

How? For me the closest thing I can get is "recent" bookmarks, but if you didn't bookmark a page recently it shows nothing at all, not even a link to all bookmarks, on the new tab page

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

#152

I get it, everything adds up and over millions of page-loads there will be a bit of wasted bandwidth. But it seems the original author blew this issue out of proportion with this post. Why even be annoyed by such a minor issue?

The author is a HN favourite. Literally any dogshit by them will get to the top of front page.

[deleted]

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is especially terrible if you are not in the habit of closing open tabs and just open new ones. I just closed a bit over 2,000 tabs on my old phone because I was switching phones. I recall reading a couple of other comments here in HN and seeing a couple of comments in reddit of other people having thousands of tabs open. Slow and buggy has NOT been my experience. I use uBlock Origin addon though, maybe that's t…

No, it's happened on two different phones over the last 2+ years. And two completely different phones, Xiaomi and Pixel.

I do wonder how you know you closed 2,000? The UI displays an infinity symbol over 99 tabs. If you had so many open, most of those would have been moved to inactive. The inactive tab section doesn't have a count and has a button you can click to close all.

Makes me sort of wonder whether you are actually using it.

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

#154
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every file displayed in a browser is a html document.

Ah, yes, how could I forgot what https://contoso.tld/users/6510/grocerylist.jpg is the file what is very prominently displayed in a browser of the every contoso.tld visitor, so it definitely demands for the browser to query https://contoso.tld/users/6510/grocerylist.jpg/favicon.ico just in case user 6510 would want to display a custom favicon when someone is watching that grocerylist.jpg, right? I understand what you…

I think it use to display a downsized version of the image.

The use case is this: I drop the icon in a folder and never look back. It just works. Why would I want an additional approach?

> These can be solved by

>

> or something.

There is nothing to solve, it already works, the line has no advantages but it does have "or something" disadvantages.

Your memory is no doubt better than mine but you didn't remember how the tag worked. is for information about the document is to describe relationships with other things. You've also left out the quotes.

    
This is the correct way of having an extra line of code that does nothing.

For fun someone thought it a good idea to also have rel="shortcut icon" I'm picturing a room full of applauding people. (Who had nothing better to do)

image/x-icon isn't really correct, x- is for experiment, it should be type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon"

Browsers accept anything in the attribute. They also support not having a type. But if our goal is to have superfluous lines of html we should definitely go with the correct IANA mime type registered in 2003.

Redundant link headers also sounds fun!

Maybe in the future there will be new fixes for problems no one has?

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are adblockers for iOS - I’m using 1Blocker with Safari. Genuine question: Are the iOS adblockers limited in some way that make them inferior compared to what you were using with your Android phone?

The only adblocker I have used is uBlock. I don't really know how adblockers work for Safari, it doesn't seem obvious. I don't like installing apps, and it seems that they are mostly apps?

Yes - from the user's point of view, they are apps - you have to download them from the app store.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many. Though they aren't common enough that it needs to be a built-in, especially as you can already specify a page specific icon via a link tag in your page's head which every up-to-date stable browser has had support for since 2010 or before (ref: https://caniuse.com/?search=link-icon ).

> Many. Can I see them?

Yes? Other people had already mentioned some in this thread.

Generally: Any circumstance where you might want the icon to change per section/page/app rather than per (sub)domain. Do you want me to enumerate all possible combinations of web server configuration and tick the ones that applies to?!

For one: perhaps you host several tools off the same domain name, either literally on the same web server or via a proxy arrangement. As I said, these circumstances aren't all that common, and when they turn up I doubt the right favicon being use is going to be something you'd care about overly, but I wouldn't be surprised to find there are circumstances where it is important enough to someone.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Why would the issue be “on iOS”? The renderer has nothing to do with how pages are fetched.

Because Apple.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is especially terrible if you are not in the habit of closing open tabs and just open new ones. I just closed a bit over 2,000 tabs on my old phone because I was switching phones. I recall reading a couple of other comments here in HN and seeing a couple of comments in reddit of other people having thousands of tabs open. Slow and buggy has NOT been my experience. I use uBlock Origin addon though, maybe that's t…

No, it's happened on two different phones over the last 2+ years. And two completely different phones, Xiaomi and Pixel. I do wonder how you know you closed 2,000? The UI displays an infinity symbol over 99 tabs. If you had so many open, most of those would have been moved to inactive. The inactive tab section doesn't have a count and has a button you can click to close all. Makes me sort of wonder whether you are ac…

There's an option to turn off the inactive tabs feature.

Trying to "share" all of them will crash Firefox, so I manually select 100 and share those, then close those, repeat 20 times (which is how I know how many tabs I had open).

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