1119436 - Opening new tab sometimes prefetches massive files

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[Peter Atashian]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141126041045

Steps to reproduce:

In my new tab page one of the pages listed was the starbound page: http://playstarbound.com/
This page has a large gif on it: http://giant.gfycat.com/PartialBewitchedKid.gif
Every time I opened a new tab, including my middle clicking on links, or just opening a blank new tab, it would fetch that gif. I confirmed this by analyzing the network traffic using wireshark.
I followed the advice of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automatically-making-connections#w_new-tab-page and switched my new tab page to blank and the issue persisted.
Only when I removed starbound from the list of pages on my new tab page did the issue go away.
I made sure to turn off all addons and extensions to ensure this was purely an issue with Firefox itself.


Actual results:

My internet would be clogged up for a minute downloading a massive gif every single time I opened a new tab, regardless of how I opened the new tab.


Expected results:

At worst it should've downloaded the gif only once. Ideally it should've realized that the gif was going to be huge and take a while and aborted the download and not attempted to download it at all ever again.

Comment 1

[Jessilyn Davis]

Hello!

This bug has been closed due to inactivity and/or the potential for this bug to no longer be an issue with the new Discovery Stream-powered New Tab experience.

Please help us triage by reopening if this issue still persists and should be addressed.

Thanks!