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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

#71

Post by jampekka »

mcculley wrote: post #63
EdwardDiego wrote: post #36

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.

They probably have to write a totally different fetching logic for the Safari wrapper. If Apple wasn't as scummy as they are, they would have used the same logic as in other platforms where this problem doesn't seem to exist.

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

#72

Post by smolder »

yosefk wrote: post #28
seism wrote: 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

> 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.

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

#73

Post by dizhn »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #17
seism wrote: 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 thought all browsers on iOS were using the apple browser engine and ditto for Android. That is, they are just skins

This changed very recently due to EU rules

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

#75

Post by bu7jjuj »

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.

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.

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

#76

Post by Aachen »

smolder wrote: post #67
phartenfeller wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The other day I found out my mobile user agent string also included the kernel build version. Way to see which, if any, exploit would be effective for the device's patch level. Thankfully it has a spoof option so I now use that to send a correct, but slightly stripped, UA string

I keep thinking I should switch to Firefox but the current ux is just so comfortable

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

#77

Post by tgv »

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

> I thought firefox on ios was just safari with a reskin

It is. It does avoid some of the tracking/ad content, so I guess it does do some things somewhat differently. But if it's such a scourge, add a favicon.

BTW, I've never seen this, and I regularly use Firefox on iOS to test.

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

#78

Post by Aachen »

missblit wrote: post #10
userbinator wrote: post #4

It's not part of individual directories. That would be stupid. Having a path-specific favicon actually sounds like a feature.

And it is a feature. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

I use this daily to tell different projects on my website apart by icon, both in browser tabs and in bookmarks
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