Bug In Samsung S3 Grabs Too Many Images, Ups Data Use

First time accepted submitter Emmanuel Cecchet writes "Researchers of the BenchLab project at UMass Amherst have discovered a bug in the browser of the Samsung S3. If you browse a Web page that has multiple versions of the same image (for mobile, tablet, desktop, etc...) like most Wikipedia pages for example, instead of downloading one image at the right resolution, the phone will download all versions of it. A page that should be less than 100K becomes multiple MB! It looks like a bug in the implementation of the srcset HTML tag, but all the details are in the paper to be presented at the IWQoS conference next week. So far Samsung didn't acknowledge the problem though it seems to affect all S3 phones. You'd better have an unlimited data plan if you browse Wikipedia on an S3!"

Use Opera Mini and you'll never worry about data

[JoeyRox]

All pages go through their browser for reformatting to your device's screen dimensions and compression. There's also an option to disable loading of images, which I use most of the time. The only downside is all your web activity is seen by their servers, so I only use the Opera for my unimportant stuff.

Re:Very few websites use srcset

[_xeno_]

Wikipedia is the only site I know that does.

Which isn't surprising: none of the major browsers support srcset yet. Not even Safari, despite srcset being an Apple-designed standard [w3.org]. (The editor is an Apple employee and is the person who came up with this standard that no one except Samsung implements.)

Of course, there's very little point to implementing srcset as the use case for "hi-DPI images" is basically non-existent, so I suppose it's just as well that almost no one has bothered implementing a nearly worthless spec.