(climate and poverty enhancement) Mozilla needs to inform users about content sizes
Categories
(Firefox :: General, enhancement)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: mozilla.bugs.grokchem, Unassigned)
Details
Steps to reproduce:
I went to connect.mozilla.org, entered a lengthy proposal for an idea.
Actual results:
It did not recognize my email address used in this bug tracker, tried to register a new account, demanded to know my age.. was dysfunctional unless I enable javascript for multiple hosts at different times. It’s a mess. I can’t be bothered. I’m just sticking my msg in the next field so the idea gets recorded somewhere.
Note as well that the links were hard to manage because there is no way to reach markdown from the WYSIWYG. I’m not going to redo all the links but I made sure the Wired article link is there.
Expected results:
The climate-related problem:
Consider the Wired article: Your website is killing the planet. The average weight of a website has quadrupled in 2021 compared to 2010. It’s growing out of control because of Cloudflare. Web designers have no incentive to produce lean websites because Cloudflare gives them performance for free. The ecocidal practice of autoplay media is increasing.
The poverty-related problem:
The cheapest internet service comes from measured rate connections. Poor people often do not have the luxury of unlimited service. It’s important that they can control their bandwidth consumption. Many websites have done away with the content-length header. This blinds users as to how big an object is before fetching it.
Firefox can take climate action and also help impoverished users by making use of the content-length field, which enables us to know before fetching an object how big it is. This header information can be used to give bandwidth-strained users control over their consumption. It can also be used to inform environmentalists of the estimated CO₂ impact a webpage has, and perhaps encourage them to take actions like disabling image loading on the high impact pages.
Some websites conceal the size of their payloads. Such websites should be red-flagged in some way so users can decide whether to visit them. Some sites give a bogus size.
Some websites force users to execute javascript that pretends to be a PDF in order to fetch a PDF, which has the effect of masking the PDF size from the user.
Firefox needs to be transparent with users about their use of resources. A similar idea was mentioned here which is CPU-focused.
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Comment 1•4 months ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::PDF Viewer' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Comment 2•4 months ago
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Hello, thank you for the enhancement suggestion! Setting as NEW so the developers can have a look.
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Comment 3•4 months ago
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The best option here would be to implement a low bandwidth mode, as the browser doesn't really know much about contents, it can just add limits.
Description
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