Bug 104585 - apple-touch-icon.png and apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png are fetched for every load, even though they're commonly 404
Summary: apple-touch-icon.png and apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png are fetched for eve...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: WebKit
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Page Loading (show other bugs)
Version: 528+ (Nightly build)
Hardware: Unspecified Unspecified
: P2 Normal
Assignee: Nobody
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-12-10 12:06 PST by Eric Seidel (no email)
Modified: 2014-08-18 13:20 PDT (History)
9 users (show)

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Description Eric Seidel (no email) 2012-12-10 12:06:37 PST
apple-touch-icon.png and apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png are fetched for every load, even though they're commonly 404

This wastes bandwidth for mobile users, as these 404 page are sometimes HUGE.

Some internal testing showed the average 404 page in our sample at 3.7k.  Meaning these requests were wasting on average nearly 8k per page!

There are two problems here:
1.  It's not clear we need to fetch these at all (until the user tries to save the page).
2.  If we are requesting these, since they're uncommon we could consider trying a HEAD request first, and only issuing the GET if the HEAD does not return 404.

Our bandwidth noted that these requests accounted for around 3-4% of mobile bandwidth usage in their (limited) testing.