Researchers over at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst have discovered a rather unnerving bug, one which could result in you wondering whether that could be the reason as to why your data bills have been higher than normal. This particular bug which was discovered in the Samsung Galaxy S3’s stock Internet browser saw it download a whole lot more images than what is necessary whenever it loads a page, and obviously when doing so, page load times are increased. Conspiracy theorists would claim that this is because Samsung is in cahoots with mobile service providers so that they can make more money, but I would say that something like that is too far fetched.
The discovery of this bug can be attributed to the quartet of Emmanuel Cecchet, Robert Sims, Xin He, and Prashant Shenoy, where they were halfway through testing a Quality of Experience (QoE) benchmark application when they stumbled upon it, and will present their discovery later this week at the IEEE Symposium in Montreal. It does not seem to affect too many people since the srcset standard (which causes the bug) is still being drafted, and to be on the safe side, just use a Firefox or Chrome browser. Ah well, better to consume more data than required compared to having your handset spontaneously combust, right?