300811 - Configurable option to reduce the size of HTTP requests

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Vipul Gupta]

According to some estimates, small, battery-powered, wireless devices
like the Berkeley/Crossbow "motes" are expected to drive a near five fold 
expansion of the Web (from 3B to 14B devices) within the next five years.
Industrial, agricultural, environmental, security and military users are just
beginning to realize how networks of such devices can revolutionize their
operations. As these devices become available at commodity prices,
they will start turning up everywhere imaginable in staggering numbers.

One way to integrate these devices into the existing web is to create
a tiny webserver that could then be embedded inside, among other
things, home appliances, utility meters, personal medical devices and
industrial sensors for secure monitoring and control across the 
Internet via a web browser [1].

The energy cost of transmitting/receiving 1 bit on these
devices is several orders of magnitude higher than the energy 
cost of a computational cycle. One way to reduce the amount
of data transmission in browser-based interaction is to
create a configurable option that eliminates many of the
non-critical HTTP headers in an HTTP request. This patch
creates a new checkbox in Mozilla's HTTP Networking preferences
such that clicking on the box reduces the size of a typical
HTTP request from ~400 bytes to ~100 bytes. See [1] for
further details.

This patch was created by Michael Wurm ([e-mail]).

[1] Gupta et al., "Sizzle: A Standards-based End-to-End Security 
Architecture for the Embedded Internet", Sun Labs Technical
Report SMLI-TR-2005-145, available at
http://research.sun.com/techrep/2005/abstract-145.html

Comment 1

[Vipul Gupta]

Attachment: Creates configurable option to omit certain headers in HTTP requests

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Not a preferences issue.

Darin, what do you think of this suggestion?

Comment 3

[Darin Fisher]

I don't think this preference should be exposed in the preferences UI.  For the purposes of our desktop apps, I think it should be sufficient to expose this preference via about:config.  In particular, since this proposed configuration disables the User-Agent header, I think we should discourage use of this preference except in highly specialized applications, such as those described in comment #0.

Comment 4

[Darin Fisher]

-> default owner

Comment 5

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

coap makes more sense