Firefox 3 downloads unasked for content in the background

Bug #256635 reported by Robert Spencer
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

I've been trying to find out where I'm leaking bandwidth. I've installed Adblock Plus [0.7.5.5] and Flashblock [1.5.6]. I've also set:

network.prefetch-next false

That slowed the problem down, but didn't stop it. So I installed squid and squidview. Firefox 3.0.1 is the only app going through squid at present.

I have "Show my windows and tabs from last time" set in the preferences, since Firefox crashes occasionally. This morning I opened a terminal, started squidview and then started Firefox. As expected Firefox retrieved yesterdays pages from cache. Everything had finished loading (no spinning throbbers on any of the tabs), so I left for 20 minutes and when I came back an additional 100MB of content had been downloaded in the background from sites in the tabs.

It's now 7 hours later and Firefox is still slowly downloading items in the background, but for sites I last viewed 3 days ago and not shown in any currently open tabs. Even weirder it's only downloading attachments (*.png, *.jpg, *.gif, *.js, *.css, favicon.ico, ...), not pages.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Aug 10 12:47:02 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
Package: firefox-3.0 3.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.3
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_ZA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox-3.0
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-19-generic i686

Tags: apport-bug
Revision history for this message
Robert Spencer (launchpad-3rock) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Could you try to reproduce the same with Ubuntu 8.10 or 9.04? Thanks in advance.

Changed in firefox-3.0:
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Alexander Sack (asac) wrote :

Not sure where your traffic comes from. Could also be that your extensions cause traffic in the background. Still doesnt sound like a firefox bug.

Changed in firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Invalid
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