I have firefox configured to show no images because I’m on a limited connection. I think the only thing I’ve changed w.r.t. my usage habits recently is to start using Lemmy again. I’m chewing through bandwidth credit quite fast, like ¼—⅓gb in a day. Does it seem possible that Lemmy would cause that even when images are disabled in firefox? I might have to lay off lemmy a few days and see how it goes.

BTW, I only just now disabled “show avatars” in the Lemmy settings, but I don’t expect that to make any difference if my browser was already configured not to show images.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    3·
    1 year ago

    Are you sure it’s not just hiding the images but still loading them for layout purposes?

    Is this mobile Firefox or desktop Firefox? If desktop, I’d recommend opening the dev tools and looking at the network tab there to see what it loads.

    It otherwise mostly do JSON API calls, and while some are not exactly optimal, I wouldn’t expect 300MB just for API calls… It’s about the data usage I used to have browsing Reddit and loading a fair bit of images and websites.

    • diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Are you sure it’s not just hiding the images but still loading them for layout purposes?

      No, in fact this is my concern. It’s hard to know considering javascript is in the mix.

      Is this mobile Firefox or desktop Firefox?

      I should have been more clear-- it’s actually Tor Browser on the desktop. I said firefox to simplify, but then it occurred to me it could be relevant. Although I think the tor overhead is negligible.

      • Big P
        2·
        1 year ago

        You can check the dev tools to see if the images are still being loaded

        • diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          thanks for the tip. Yes I can see that there is an attempt to load images but there is a little prohibited icon. So I’m not sure what that really means. If images are disabled in the browser settings, then I think there should not even be an attempt to fetch them. I wonder if javascript is bypassing the config and fetching the image, but then the browser is simply blocking them from display.

          • Big P
            2·
            1 year ago

            if it’s showing that icon then it’s likely blocking the request to load the image fine. I believe the dev tools should also show you how much data was transferred. Looking at loading the frontpage of lemmy it seems that it uses about 80kb of data.

            • diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
              1·
              1 year ago

              Ah, well if the front page is 80kb that might explain it. So apparently there’s just some really heavy text especially if each subsequent page is anywhere near 80kb.