Author: jason
Description:
An academic paper was released yesterday that gained quite a bit of press because it asserted that the Samsung Galaxy S3 browser had a bug in it that caused it to download much more data that it should.
Original paper:
http://lass.cs.umass.edu/papers/pdf/mbenchlab_iwqos13.pdf
Sample news coverage:
http://classic.slashdot.org/story/13/05/31/2312239
I believe the authors of the report erroneously concluded that this is a bug with Samsung's browser and it is instead a bug in WikiMedia's implementation of the srcset syntax.
The authors wrote:
"By looking at the recorded HTML page source, we saw that Wikipedia pages use srcset HTML tags that indicate a list of images to pick from depending on the resolution and magnification needed by the device. It turns out that the S3 browser has a bug and systematically downloads all images in a srcset instead of picking only the one it needs (left most red circles on Fig. 14 show 3 different versions of the same image being downloaded). This can result in a massive amount of extra data download."
But that conclusion is likely incorrect because:
- WebKit has yet to implement srcset https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110252
- Wikimedia has its own polyfill version of the jQuery HiDPI plugin that actually handles srcset, not anything the browser is doing https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-core/commit/966cda2f802cd6cf08d9b73f75fc4b0e7beab625
I've contacted the authors to determine if they saw anything specifically that indicated that this was a Samsung bug. But it seems most likely this is a problem with the polyfill which is why I decided to submit a bug here as well.
Version: 1.22.0
Severity: normal
OS: other
Platform: Smartphone