Fire Fox is a data hog
All of a sudden, FF (38.0.5) on Mac OS X Yosemite is sucking down nearly 2 GB of data per day. I've lost 3 GB on a 5GB data plan in 6 days. Who is stealing my data rate? I've checked through Activity Monitor on the Mac and found Firefox to be by far the largest network data user, and the same thing is reflected on my Android phone. Please help me learn out to get inside Fire Fox and strip out/stop this code responsible for this theft. I may be old-school (A+ and Network+ cert for life in 2001), but I can learn.
Is there a way to "simply" FF data operations, like to minimize complex data downloading to the computer from web pages pushing data-rich content?
Thank you.
Chosen solution
Cor-el, thank you for your reply, but that wasn't it. It was FACEBOOK. It would pull down 3-8 MB every time I looked up to see a new reply or a new post. I eventually figured it out. I ended up changing to m.facebook.com, which works without requiring a mobile device user agent and looking for mobile versions of any web site that I frequent on a regular basis. Data throughput dropped from as much as 500-800 MB in one day to around 120-140 MB in an entire day. Now, in the future, I have more space for downloading books I use in my research that I'm doing now.
Is it true that using a mobile device user agent still doesn't prevent websites from sending your browser the full contents before it gets rendered for mobile display? I found that using such an agent didn't solve the problem of large data usage. The best way to handle it was to use a mobile version of a web site, and now I don't have to watch my surfing as closely, though I have been watching Activity Monitor closely to see how my actions affect data throughput.
Thank you.
Because I complained about the data limitations and how they didn't have an 8 GB plan, they cut the data used TWICE from what I can see in the Data Usage meter!
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (7)
Please type about:support into your addressbar, and then press Enter. copy and paste the data there into this thread.
Firefox is a web browser, so it will download the data you want it to. Have you checked to make sure there are no big downloads in the recent history, have you installed adblocking software like adblockplus to save bandwidth, or even gone as far as installing add-ons to block images so you don't have to download every image on every site you visit? Sites can rapidly add up, and just an hour of surfing can be 100's of MB of data.
Is this the data you were looking for? Something has to explain the sudden increase in data from roughly 4 GB per month to about 17-18 GB of data.
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Try to create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problem.
See "Creating a profile":
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox#Profile_issues
If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.
Chosen Solution
Cor-el, thank you for your reply, but that wasn't it. It was FACEBOOK. It would pull down 3-8 MB every time I looked up to see a new reply or a new post. I eventually figured it out. I ended up changing to m.facebook.com, which works without requiring a mobile device user agent and looking for mobile versions of any web site that I frequent on a regular basis. Data throughput dropped from as much as 500-800 MB in one day to around 120-140 MB in an entire day. Now, in the future, I have more space for downloading books I use in my research that I'm doing now.
Is it true that using a mobile device user agent still doesn't prevent websites from sending your browser the full contents before it gets rendered for mobile display? I found that using such an agent didn't solve the problem of large data usage. The best way to handle it was to use a mobile version of a web site, and now I don't have to watch my surfing as closely, though I have been watching Activity Monitor closely to see how my actions affect data throughput.
Thank you.
Because I complained about the data limitations and how they didn't have an 8 GB plan, they cut the data used TWICE from what I can see in the Data Usage meter!
Some websites will send content for a mobile device if they detect that the screen size is below a certain threshold.
Maybe use an adblock extension to block as much content as possible if you only want to check for replies and updates and disable this blocker if you want to access the full page.
I've always used ad block and flash block, which did not help. FB just kept taking that much data every time I looked up. I even ran image blocker for a couple of days to see if it would make a difference - nope. It's something about FB that just sucks down data.
Thanks.
You can check the Network log in the Web Console (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer) to see what data gets loaded.