Firefox behavior on Linux/Mac systems

I don't see this from Windows systems

[SumGuy]

For the past 2 to 3 months I'm noticing what looks like automated or autonomous web hits from systems using these user-agents:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv: 69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

It's as if on either a weekly or monthly basis, firefox is going out and updating or re-caching pages that the user had previously accessed - Or specifically just the landing page of sites that were previously accessed. This behavior makes it hard to catagorize this activity from a web-metrics perspective. This is not bot activity (it is not coming from IP's associated with bots or commercial servers - it's coming from a few .EDU's in the US).

Does anyone else see this from those UA's?

[dstiles]

You can't rule out bots. There are many that come from broadband and edu IPs, some good but most bad or ambiguous. Check the other headers and see if they conform to a human browser. It may be coincidental that they are coming from both Mac and Linux but check the IPs to see if they use the same IPs - ie that they are rotating the User-Agent from a common source.

It's unlikely this is a Firefox problem alone. Maybe the best place to pursue this is in the spiders forum here [webmasterworld.com...]

[SumGuy]

In at least one case I know that this activity was preceded by a hit that we later had contact with (the person) and the hit had spent some time going through our site. The hit had a google referrer. Then later I see these hits to our landing page happening on what looks like every 7 days - with no referrer. These hits load our entire set of 32 files (including favicon.ico) that fully renders the page. I never see bots do that. And I know (and block) all the comp-sci and engineering subnets at various universities that run bots and IOT crawlers.

This is not bot behavior - this must be behavior in-built into firefox 68+ running on linux-based systems. Perhaps it's the OS somehow initiating this behavior.

Edit: Unless what I'm seeing is coming from a network appliance, a caching router or firewall? That replicates user-activity (including replicating the user-agent) in order to increase network performance (and user productivity?)

[phranque]

The way third party cookies were handled has changed in Firefox 69. Perhaps this has affected the way your page gets refreshed when reopening a browser with an open tab to your page.

[dstiles]

If something is loading the whole site, css, images and all, suspect a site ripper aiming to reproduce your site for some nefarious purpose. It might not be, of course. But why do you not get similar hits from other browsers? And is it really firefox or a bot with a firefox UA?