288282 - If-Modified-Since header not sent for livemarks at startup

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 274382

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Philip Ross]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

When starting Firefox, a request is made to retrieve the feed for each livemark.
This request is sent without an If-Modified-Since HTTP header, causing the full
feed to be retrieved.

Not sending an If-Modified-Since header causes extra load on servers as feeds
are retrieved each time a user starts Firefox. Some sites will ban clients
automatically if too many requests are sent
(http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#ac1050).

It also means more bandwidth is consumed on the client than is absolutely
necessary (a particular problem for dial-up users - see bug 287341).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Add a livemark.
2. Close down all Firefox windows.
3. Open Firefox with a packet sniffer running in the background.
Actual Results:  
A request is made for each feed with no If-Modified-Since header.

Expected Results:  
The last modified date of each feed should be stored. This date should be sent
in an If-Modified-Since header so that only feeds that have changed are downloaded.

Better still, it would be good if Firefox could only make requests for feeds
that are due a refresh anyway (i.e. making sure sites are only polled at their
update frequency).

Comment 1

[Philip Ross]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 274382 ***

Comment 2

[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