1865393 - New tab page and URL suggestions cause excessive background web requests.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Fenix :: Search, defect)

Description

[Stephen]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Installed Firefox 119 on Android
2. Went to a few pages for a website I control.
3. Added a new tab.
4. Started typing a URL where Firefox would suggest some of the pages I had visited already.

Actual results:

At step 3, I see from my websites access logs that multiple background requests were made simultaneously to the pages that I had visited before. My guess is this is from the "Recently Visited" section.

At step 4, I see more simultaneous background requests for pages I had visited before. As far as I can tell, it repetitively makes requests for each key pressed for the URLs that have substring matches.

Expected results:

In steps 3 & 4, no background requests should be made.

From a website I manage, I've been seeing an uptick in this from Firefox on Android for the past month or so.

Comment 1

[Jeff Boek [:boek]]

Hey Stephen,

Are you able to reproduce this on 120? Or 121 beta?

I haven't been able to reproduce this successfully after standing up a server and following the given steps to reproduce.

Comment 2

[Stephen]

Hey, Jeff. Thanks for looking into this. I downloaded 120 and confirmed it's still and issue. I also see the issue in server logs from 119 and 120.

I'm not a regular Android user, so I had installed a fresh version of Firefox, which means that the server I was testing with was very likely to be URLs that Firefox suggested. Also, I made sure that the URL I was typing was showing as a suggestion. For example, if I had example.com/page-1, example.com/page-2, etc. in my history, I would type "e", then "x", then "a" and Firefox would show me those previous URLs as suggestions after each character. However, at the same time, it would make background requests to those URLs.

Here are some user agents I'm seeing in my server logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android 6.0.1; Mobile; rv:120.0) Gecko/120.0 Firefox/120.0 <-- This one was me, so don't pay much attention to my decrepit tablet.
Mozilla/5.0 (Android 14; Mobile; rv:120.0) Gecko/120.0 Firefox/120.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Android 13; Mobile; rv:120.0) Gecko/120.0 Firefox/120.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Android 13; Mobile; rv:109.0) Gecko/119.0 Firefox/119.0