[Bug 256635] [NEW] Firefox 3 downloads unasked for content in the background

[Robert Spencer]

Public bug reported:

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

** Affects: firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: apport-bug

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Firefox 3 downloads unasked for content in the background
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/256635
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