287341 - Livemarks shouldn't load on startup

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Daniel McKenzie]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

When you start Firefox, every livemark (or live bookmark) that you have is
redownloaded. If you are on a dial-up connection, and have a lot of livemarks,
then this significantly slows down your surfing for the first few minutes of
browsing. What makes things worse, when in bug 255485 they resolved that
livemarks ignore the cache (with bug 274382 going against that move), is that
everytime you start up Firefox again it reloads every livemark. It basically
kills your connection until they have all downloaded, as well as wasting server
resources.

I have a 56k modem and 29 livemarks. While the problem does go away after about
5 minutes, it still seems unnecessary to load the livemarks at startup. The
end-user may not even access their livemarks during the entire browsing session.
They may only look at some.

Some RSS feeds even ban you after you have downloaded the feed a certain number
of times, for example, Slashdot. Of course I'm downloading it everytime I start
Firefox, and in one day (or one session) I could do it several times.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox with a lot of Livemarks in your bookmarks and on a modem.
2. Browse the web.
Actual Results:  
The connection is hogged with livemark downloads until they are all initially
downloaded, then browsing resumes at normal modem speeds.

Expected Results:  
Only download the livemarks when a user wants to read them. (i.e. when the user
moves the mouse over the livemark folder).

Comment 1

[Daniel McKenzie]

Sorry for spamming, but the actual bug that went through stopping livemarks
checking the cache is bug 255458.

Comment 2

[Ali Ebrahim]

On the one hand, loading livemarks at startup is great for broadband users who
have snappy access to livemarks when they first try to access them. OTOH, it
sucks for dialup users. Mike, what do you think about having a user accessible
preference for this? Though I'm not clear on what the preference would actually
control exactly.

Comment 3

[Philip Ross]

One compromise might be to only request feeds that need a refresh and send
If-Modified-Since headers so that only feeds that have changed are downloaded.

See bug 288282.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change