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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://aggressivelyparaphrasing.me/2022/12/12/why-does-my-low-traffic-wordpress-blog-http-503-service-unavailable-when-i-click-around-using-firefox-on-iphone/" rel="nofollow">https://aggressivelyparaphrasing.me/2022/12/12/why-does-my-l...</a><p>It was resolved a while back so maybe it’s similar symptoms but different root cause, or maybe it’s people using older versions?
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113">https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113</a>
I thought firefox on ios was just safari with a reskin because apple doesn't allow other browser engines on their phone?<p>Firefox on android is amazing with its plugin support, though I still prefer their pre-2021 UI
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.
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. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
There are some suggestions on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/1321878/961353" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/q/1321878/961353</a> for disabling the favicon request completely.
Here's the code, for those interested in finding the bug: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/tree/main/BrowserKit/Sources/SiteImageView/FaviconURLProcessing">https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/tree/main/Brow...</a>
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?
> And yet, this thing decides to beat the shit out of the web server while trying to get it.<p>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.
Title implies that this article thirdly explains how to waste annoying sysadmins, which is an entertaining prospect.<p>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?
> 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.<p>It makes a debouncing. It compares the result with the previous to be sure it is OK. /s
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.