YJL

Welcome warning text of about:networking

Last night, I was browsing through Firefox’s about:about, yes, it even has an About page for About page, which lists all pages under the about: scheme.

The reason I was there is because just recently I was visiting a website and it somehow ate up all my memory and began to trigger swapping. It was about 200MB swap was made before I noticed. It turned out it’s a Flash doing that, and from look of the page, a video being loaded, but only a few minutes video duration, I don’t know how it could use up almost two gigabytes and could be much more if I’d not stopped it, maybe more than one video was being buffered, perhaps some were queuing up. I’d never know.

This was not first time happening to me, there are different sites loading stuff that users have a good chance not to play them. Some news website, they automatically play news clip, although they kindly mute the audio, but I am usually only there for reading the news in text, not to watch or listen to them. I also noticed a well-known dictionary would have a video on top-right of layout, something about words I believe, never unmute it.

They are just utterly wastes. It’s just as annoying as the alert box. If it’s a pure video websites like YouTube, I don’t mind auto-playing, but it would be nice to have a switch — hear that, YouTube?

Why would websites think it’s good idea to force visitors — especially first-time visitors who may not come back again — watch videos even it’s related?

The weirdest part about that video swapping my memory was at the end of page, you had to page down a few time in order to notice, if it wasn’t eating up memory, I’d never seen that video player on the page.

To battle with this kind of ridiculousness once and for all, I switched every plugin’s setting to Ask to Activate in about:addons, mainly for Flash, but it’s no harm to make them all this way. I also blocked the ask for Location in about:permission, which is another annoying point to me.

After that I found the list because I also wanted to see if there is a simple switch for JavaScript, didn’t find one for individual sites, not even globally. I really hope I can switch on JavaScript per website, it might help to let web developer and designer to focus on content rather than fancy effects. Websites these days are lack of quality in terms of content, but you get 90% of CPU utilization and 90-plus external resources just to render a page. I was just exaggerating the number, but they are really too fat, not even remotely cute.

Anyhow, as I going through each page, I found the about:networking page, which I wasn’t going to open up, but glad I did. Reading the warning text:

This is very experimental. Do not use without adult supervision.

I couldn’t help but wonder this is another humor in Firefox, or like in Chrome. I found Integrate about:networking into Firefox, it would seem that it was an add-on in 2013.

Adult supervision? Well, not sure about that even in these days, kids might still be even more accustomed to new technology. The old kids have grown up to be adults and parents, and becoming less adventurous. It would make more sense or at least funnier if it read like:

This is very experimental. Do not use without pretending you are quizzing your twelve-year-old kid first.