Live data from Hacker News

How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

61–70 of 158 posts

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

#61
post #42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I thought it was basically Firefox with another HTML rendering engine (and I guess javascript runtime).

Those are the main parts of the browser.

They are large parts of the browser, certainly. But they don't encompass all the fun network, fetch, and caching behaviour entailed in this issue.

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

#62

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.

This isn't a very constructive comment. Are we supposed to believe that one can never criticise any piece of software, ever, on the off-chance that some other piece of software, somewhere, once contained a similar issue?

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

#63
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

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.

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

#64
post #5

Interesting. From a user experience, Firefox for iPhone has been a really excellent app, it’s been my preferred browser for years.

Even if it’s basically a skin for Safari?

Yeah I like FF sync to move tabs and send stuff to other devices. I have an android phone, an iPad and a Linux PC.

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites where users each get a directory for their profile.

These can be solved by or something. Do this require a browser probing every path with /favicon.ico?

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

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

#66
post #57

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.

Nope, for me it includes the Android version but no device model information.

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

#67
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.

Nope, for me it includes the Android version but no device model information.

They fixed it after the issue was present for MANY YEARS, exactly as stated.

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

#68

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.

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

#70
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These can be solved by or something. Do this require a browser probing every path with /favicon.ico?

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

Then put the location in an HTTP Link header.
Post reply on HN