Can I safely block Dalvik browser agent requests?

Question

I\'ve noticed that when users on Android-OS devices visit my site, there\'s constantly two requests happening on each page. The first is the normal browser, and the second is fr

Answer 1

This happens whenever a browser/WebView cannot render a particular server response (maybe it's a PDF, or a streaming server, or whatever) and then triggers an intent to the operating system to open another application. The VM (Dalvik) is what handles this routing, and in the process, may download the file to the device so that the other application can access it (normally, applications cannot access one another's files, but the other application needs the file to render it).

Crucially, it downloads the file before launching the intent, and the file ends up downloaded twice: once by the browser to figure out it doesn't know how to handle it, and once by Dalvik so it can pass a file:// URL to an application you might or might not launch.