[HN Gopher] How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sys...
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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins
Author : zoidb
Score : 264 points
Date : 2024-06-29 06:07 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| ggm wrote:
| I have to laugh when the robots fetch the .ico file
| dspillett wrote:
| I'm sure some do that deliberately, to remove one way to
| identify bots automatically and block them or give them bad
| content.
| perfect_wave wrote:
| I use Firefox for iPhone. Sorry At least if probably wastes less
| energy than messing around with generative AI
| userbinator wrote:
| _It 's not part of individual directories. That would be stupid._
|
| Having a path-specific favicon actually sounds like a feature.
| chime wrote:
| Long ago, I implemented that by pragma no-cache and checking
| the referrer. It wasn't perfect but it worked for most users.
| missblit wrote:
| And it is a feature.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
| Aachen wrote:
| I use this daily to tell different projects on my website
| apart by icon, both in browser tabs and in bookmarks
| vasco wrote:
| That's the point the author made.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It is quite easy these days if you define <meta> tags to
| specify the icon (as opposed to depending on files being in the
| right places).
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > 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?
| userbinator wrote:
| Sites where users each get a directory for their profile.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| These can be solved by <meta
| favicon=./user_favicon.ico>
|
| or something.
|
| Do this _require_ a browser probing _every path_ with
| /favicon.ico?
| 6510 wrote:
| Not every file displayed in a browser is a html document.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Then put the location in an HTTP Link header.
| shagie wrote:
| 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/ap
| i/org/xml/sax/helpers/DefaultHandler.html
| dspillett wrote:
| 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).
| jb1991 wrote:
| Interesting. From a user experience, Firefox for iPhone has been
| a really excellent app, it's been my preferred browser for years.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Even if it's basically a skin for Safari?
| fmbb wrote:
| Is it?
|
| I thought it was basically Firefox with another HTML
| rendering engine (and I guess javascript runtime).
| immibis wrote:
| Those are the main parts of the browser.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| 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.
| fastily wrote:
| Not for long. Apple just started allowing 3rd party browser
| engines in the EU
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-
| ios-17-4-b...
| dspillett wrote:
| Only in the EU because of that ruling. IIRC they are not
| implementing the requirement elsewhere (though they might
| eventually if the difference gets sufficient bad press or
| becomes technically inconvenient).
| jb1991 wrote:
| I don't know how they are doing it differently, but it's
| definitely a different experience than Safari.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| > First up, why in the hell do you need to request the same link
| 12 times? No, scratch that, 15 times, since it does 3 more after
| getting the css and feed icon.
|
| It makes a debouncing. It compares the result with the previous
| to be sure it is OK. /s
| seism wrote:
| 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
| seism wrote:
| Also, when I saw the headline, I had to think of all the LLM
| scrapers and bots (soon to be running directly on your
| AIphone!) roaming the Interwebs.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Just yesterday I blocked the bots from my blog using this[1].
| Of course whether these bots respect robots.txt nowadays is a
| different question altogether
|
| [1]: https://github.com/fardog/fardog.io/commit/b2e3eac838ea2
| 5209...
| fartfeatures wrote:
| They do not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40759916
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I thought all browsers on iOS were using the apple browser
| engine and ditto for Android.
|
| That is, they are just skins
| JimDabell wrote:
| They are using the WebKit rendering engine, but there's a lot
| more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. They
| aren't just skins.
| ctxc wrote:
| Could you add a more to that? What other complex parts are
| built by FF?
| fmbb wrote:
| What do you think is complex?
| matsemann wrote:
| Not necessarily complex, but the tab switcher etc is
| built by Firefox, and probably is what tries to load the
| favicons to display the icon somewhere?
| JimDabell wrote:
| Why the "complex" qualifier? The code responsible for the
| incorrect favicon URL bug is very simple, and part of the
| Firefox codebase not WebKit:
|
| https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-
| ios/blob/bd589c194...
|
| Firefox on iOS has about 200k lines of Swift. As a rough
| rule of thumb, everything that isn't directly related to
| rendering something within the page or executing
| JavaScript is Firefox code not WebKit code. So bookmarks,
| syncing, tabs, etc.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Yea, that's basically it on iOS, although there is a bunch
| ux, so it's not nothing
|
| On android, browsers can ship their own engines, and they do.
| There is actually some freedom on android.
| dizhn wrote:
| This changed very recently due to EU rules
| yosefk wrote:
| 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
| fnord123 wrote:
| 404s don't get cached. At least I don't configure anything to
| cache them.
| yosefk wrote:
| 404s have got to be very cheap to serve
| bandrami wrote:
| But they aren't always!
| chiph wrote:
| Not when you're on a metered connection, or on a high
| latency one.
|
| Don't make your customers pay for your sloppy habits is a
| good policy to have.
| fnord123 wrote:
| If the CDN returns a 404 or the origin server, then your
| satellite phone is still waiting.
| theginger wrote:
| This why in a lot of contexts it would be good to at least
| be micro catching them. If they were cached for 5 seconds
| it would have covered all subsequent requests.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > A 404 response is cacheable by default; i.e., unless
| otherwise indicated by the method definition or explicit
| cache controls
|
| --
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.4
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| 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)
| yosefk wrote:
| A CDN caches across users, lowers latency by having servers
| closer to the user, and lowers the bandwidth your server
| needs to handle. Cloudflare CDN has a free tier and I
| assume others do, too, so it's fairly easy to provision.
| mcculley wrote:
| Why would the issue be "on iOS"? The renderer has nothing
| to do with how pages are fetched.
| jampekka wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| Pretty weird to think that running a web server also means
| you should operate "a geographically distributed network of
| proxy servers and their data centers".
|
| I also think it's pretty weird to defend thoroughly defect
| software with "waste ful, sure, but hardly that big a deal".
| smolder wrote:
| > 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.
| yosefk wrote:
| 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
| theshrike79 wrote:
| But if clients were considerate, we wouldn't need to
| waste electricity and work hours to run CDNs?
| yosefk wrote:
| 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.
| tristan9 wrote:
| 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.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I can easily have hundreds of Chrome tabs open, and none of
| this happens. I can have hundreds of tabs inadvertently open in
| iOS Safari, and none of this happens.
|
| Would you kindly refrain from blaming users for what clearly is
| a bug in the application?
| cwillu wrote:
| Hell, I have hundreds of tabs open on firefox on my android
| phone, and none of this happens.
| markerz wrote:
| Oh hey, I wrote that last issue linked! What crazy Deja vu.
| Here's me discovering the issue that led me to find some wild
| behavior.
|
| Basically Firefox loaded favicons 4x the number of tabs opened to
| that website. It would do this every time I opened or closed any
| tab.
|
| https://aggressivelyparaphrasing.me/2022/12/12/why-does-my-l...
|
| It was resolved a while back so maybe it's similar symptoms but
| different root cause, or maybe it's people using older versions?
| gwd wrote:
| Wordpress handles 404s really slowly? I'm kind of surprised it
| works at all then, as at least in my logs there's a very steady
| stream of bots probing it for vulnerabilities by trying random
| URLs.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It may intentionally 404 slowly? One web service I worked on
| added a few hundred milliseconds delay in returning 404s to
| slow down this kind of probing attack
| gwd wrote:
| Ooh, that's a good idea actually. But it doesn't explain
| this:
|
| > If I click enough, I'd eventually see HTTP 503 Service
| Unavailable.
|
| That normally only happens when the reverse proxy has a
| timeout, which would normally only happen when the backend
| was completely overloaded.
|
| Unless WP has an exponential delay, and the 503 is just the
| exponential delay becoming longer than the reverse proxy
| timeout? But why would the _main_ page that the guy is
| loading say 503, when random non-critical parts like
| favicon.ico get a 503?
|
| Unless the exponential delay is _per IP address_ -- so all
| the misses to favicon.ico are actually slowing down the
| main connections past the reverse proxy timeout?
|
| EDIT: Actually, no, they have graphs of the server actually
| spiking memory and CPU usage; you'd expect intentional
| exponential delay to _reduce_ memory and CPU usage.
| markerz wrote:
| I managed to get around it with litespeed Cache which does
| cache 404 pages. I was previously using WP Super Cache which
| does not. Note I also wasn't running a CDN so there's no
| reverse proxy cache either.
|
| Over time, I found that BetterLinks was slowing down my site
| significantly (600ms) . It wasn't like this when I first
| investigated. It became slow over the course of a year or so.
| I ended up replacing it with Simple 301 Redirects. I think
| this is a separate issue though, unrelated to my original
| overload, but looked very similar to when Firefox DOSed my
| site.
|
| I experimented with CDNs to cache things reverse proxy style
| as a catch all. Eventually I caved and enabled Cloudflare CDN
| because QUIC.cloud kept having problems where a POP node kept
| hitting 403 Forbidden. I'd say the site is pretty
| functionally performant now.
|
| I think most sites that claim Wordpress handles high loads
| really well have at least two layers of caching in front of
| it and are running on dedicated boxes. Remove both of those
| and suddenly it's super easy to DOS.
|
| Another common DOS exploit is to repeatedly spam the Forgot
| Password form, since there's a lot of guaranteed processing
| with that and it's not cacheable. I hid mine behind a captcha
| which helps a lot.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| 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?
| pjmlp wrote:
| I for one, have no patience for Feel Good culture.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're
| referring to as Fell Good culture, is in fact, toxic
| positivity/Feel Good culture, or as I've recently taken to
| calling it, toxic positivity plus Feel Good culture.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, spot on.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| There are some suggestions on
| https://stackoverflow.com/q/1321878/961353 for disabling the
| favicon request completely.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Title implies that this article thirdly explains how to waste
| annoying sysadmins, which is an entertaining prospect.
|
| Are we talking about not putting annoying sysadmins to good use?
| Or are we talking about, you know, makin sure they don't cause
| nobody no trouble again, boss?
| bennettlp wrote:
| I remember something similar with Internet Explorer back in the
| day, where it would ask for the favicon (which we didn't have
| setup at the time) so our 404 page would be returned, which then
| seemed to trigger another request for a favicon. (+deg#deg)+( +-+
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Makes me wonder what it would do if you throw a couple of
| 301/307/308 at it.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Now let's see the savings from not talking to ad servers and
| running the Javascript from those trackers.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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
| smolder wrote:
| 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.
| phartenfeller wrote:
| Nope, for me it includes the Android version but no device
| model information.
| smolder wrote:
| They fixed it after the issue was present for MANY YEARS,
| exactly as stated.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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
| cuu508 wrote:
| OK, so it was NOT amazing for MANY YEARS, but now it is
| ;-)
| bu7jjuj wrote:
| 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.
| sunaookami wrote:
| 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.
| erinaceousjones wrote:
| Not ever had Firefox for android be slow and buggy for
| myself! I've been using it in place of chrome on my phone
| for a good year. Honestly everyone keeps talking about
| how FF is "slow and buggy" and it has NEVER given me
| issue :/ why is my subjective experience so different to
| your subjective experience?
|
| Meanwhile chrome/chromium is the one which is most likely
| to cause me GPU driver crashes, but that's because I use
| it for fun VR and "let's see how big I can make textures"
| experiments. Generally it manages a higher frame rate
| than FF in that context with stability as tradeoff.
| pohuing wrote:
| 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
| jakub_g wrote:
| 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.
| erinaceousjones wrote:
| Ah, fair point. I'm on a pixel 6, so I have a privileged
| perspective that like 90% of smartphone browser users
| don't have because fairly new and fast SoC with a good
| amount of memory. I hadn't considered how much a
| difference that makes, because conceptually in my head
| "it's just webpages!" like we're still in the early
| 2000's
| onli wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience at all. It was Firefox
| that made web browsing bearable again on my old android
| device.
| carlob wrote:
| 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.
| cduzz wrote:
| 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?"
| sierisimo wrote:
| But is completely Firefox fault? Some companies just test
| compatibility and optimize with Chrome in mind,
| forgetting that sometimes some browsers (Firefox as well)
| dont respect some standards. Or even adding some features
| only available in some browsers.
|
| Yes, is not as bad as it was in the 90s or 2000s, but is
| still a common issue
| thequux wrote:
| I use Firefox on a ~2020 era Android, and not even a
| particularly great one at that. Works fine for me aside
| from a very few badly written sites, and certainly not
| any shower than chrome.
| mattmanser wrote:
| 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 memory, causing
| issues such as Reddit not being able to load videos. They
| tried to fix this by more aggressively moving older tabs
| to an 'inactive' tab area, but it didn't work.
|
| It at least _feels_ badly written, saying that as an
| experienced developer myself. However, I know browsers
| are one of the hardest things to make, so perhaps it is
| just averagely written. But it is nowhere near Chrome 's
| level of competence.
|
| The new UI is awful too, I still hate a lot of design
| decisions and feel it was a bad mis-step. The old UI was
| just better. Again, I emphasise I use the browser daily
| and I say this with plenty of time to get used to it.
| oldmariner wrote:
| > 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 the
| difference? I bet resource-hogging ads could be an issue.
|
| Edit: I also had "studies" turned off. Perhaps you were
| in a study that was testing something that caused those
| issues? (That's why I don't like default "studies" or A/B
| testing.). Or maybe something else (physical or software)
| on your phone is damaged/defective, perhaps even your
| installation of the Firefox app got borked?
| sunaookami wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's not "a bit" better. uBlock can tell a difference
| between seeing an ad from network X and going to the
| website of network X. It can block ads hosted by the
| owner. It can allow you to click a tracking link from an
| email while still blocking ads on the target website.
| Finally you can unblock something as a one-off without
| disabling the system for the whole device/network. The
| quality difference is huge.
| technofiend wrote:
| ublock makes sites like imgur usable. it's trivial to add
| a nice rule that deletes all those login via social media
| buttons just as one example of what the hosts file can't
| do.
| maeil wrote:
| There's Brave on Android fwiw.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Brave is still just a fancy Chromium reskin, I'll use any
| other engine than Chrome if it's even remotely possible
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| staplers wrote:
| Brave has similar anti-privacy/adtech built in
|
| They even market it: https://brave.com/brave-ads/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| 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?
| vorticalbox wrote:
| There is also this issue
|
| To address this, we will measure Telemetry Coverage, which is
| the percentage of all Firefox users who report telemetry. The
| Telemetry Coverage measurement will sample a portion of all
| Firefox clients and report whether telemetry is enabled. This
| measurement will not include a client identifier and will not
| be associated with our standard telemetry.
|
| Even if you turn telemetry off it will still call home
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-
| measuri...
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >...directed at the company and not any specific people in
| their employ.
|
| They are the same thing, until you get to the upper levels,
| that own the place ie 'take full responsibility'. We are fa-
| mily. Until the shit hits the fan.
| tgv wrote:
| > 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.
| chithanh wrote:
| 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
|
| * etc.
| erinaceousjones wrote:
| 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 as I expect it to, although it does
| bug me how it strips the protocol from the URL so I have to
| manually type in `http://` for plaintext sites even when I've
| visited them before; depending on who you ask that is
| considered a "security feature" but kinda annoying. Other
| than that, I start typing in a URL and it shows me
| suggestions from my history followed by option to use my
| preferred search engine to search it.
|
| All in all, I've not really felt FF (even nightly) be
| particularly different or unstable to using chrome.
|
| Second comment I've made in this thread where I'm replying
| (ever so helpfully) "Huh, but it works for me" so I'll stop
| now :-). I promise the Mozilla Foundation aren't bribing nor
| blackmailing me.
| oldmariner wrote:
| I don't remember seeing Pocket, so I went back to the
| settings to look. There's an option to have "Thought-
| provoking stories" which in smaller text says "Powered by
| Pocket".
|
| Considering I didn't even realize it said Pocket the first
| time around, I think bookmarks are more prominent over
| Pocket, so I don't see bookmarks being demoted in favor of
| Pocket.
| csande17 wrote:
| For a while, bookmarks were demoted in favor of
| Collections, a jankier version of bookmarks that didn't
| sync properly to desktop and included a button to open
| all of them at once in multiple tabs.
|
| Collections are still there, but they've made it easier
| to use regular bookmarks too, so now Firefox for Android
| just has two versions of bookmarks in it for some reason.
|
| Entirely unrelated to Pocket, as far as I know, except in
| the general sense of Mozilla having bad ideas related to
| bookmarks.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| 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/
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| You clearly did not understand that woman's point.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I don't understand her point. I guess that she's
| uncomfortable with human aesthetics? Why would being
| pretty require sacrifices in health and self-respect? One
| of the largest factors in looking good is being in good
| shape/physically healthy. Avoiding skin damage from UV is
| also a big one. Why would you lose self-respect for
| looking good?
| loufe wrote:
| Given the seriously negative sibling comments, I thought I'd
| weigh in with my own experience. I'm unaware of anything behind
| the scenes, but I've always enjoyed the user experience in
| Firefox on Android, at least for the last couple years before
| the rewrite. I don't like browsing the web on my phone, but
| it's made it bearable.
|
| I can't speak to the problems behind the scenes though, and
| they certainly merit attention.
| butterNaN wrote:
| Firefox on Android is a godsend to me, and the secret is that I
| can install uBlock origin and noscript on my mobile. I get a
| whiplash when I see someone else browsing the web without
| these, it is absurd how much attention people will allow to be
| just stolen away.
| Twirrim wrote:
| 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.
| sirn wrote:
| 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).
| nanidin wrote:
| iOS allows third party browser engines since iOS 17.4 in the
| EU.
| Two4 wrote:
| No one is splitting their codebase for a single market if
| it doesn't make business sense. For a nonprofit with
| limited resources, I don't think it would make sense.
| nanidin wrote:
| That is Firefox's decision then, not a restriction by
| Apple as indicated by GP.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Apple doesn't restrict it at all outside the EU too?
| shantara wrote:
| I recall seeing some users complain about getting a temp ban on a
| niche forum when using Firefox for iOS, which was probably caused
| by this issue.
| instagib wrote:
| I occasionally get this from some sites. Sometimes switch to
| safari or reset Firefox fixes it.
|
| I use Firefox as a quick lookup because the tabs crash often
| and it hardly ever saves the websites I was on when re-opening.
| So far I have crashed safari and lost all my tabs once ever.
| Firefox focus does a pretty good job too for quick lookups.
| yokoprime wrote:
| 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?
| globular-toast wrote:
| The author is a HN favourite. Literally any dogshit by them
| will get to the top of front page.
| jepler wrote:
| 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.
| Aloha wrote:
| No - as someone who reads her on feed - not particularly, and
| only in certain cases.
| batch12 wrote:
| The post would be pointless if it didn't identify the browser
| in question.
| yuliyp wrote:
| The author obfuscates her employers. Stuff she discovers as an
| end user will get named.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Her recent series on RSS feed readers has avoided naming
| virtually any of them.
|
| I can't imagine she is working for them all.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > 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.
| johnp_ wrote:
| Here's the code, for those interested in finding the bug:
| https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/tree/main/Brow...
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