Tuesday, May 10, 2005Google Web Accelerator prefetching problems
A lot of people have discovered problems with the prefetching features in Google's
Web Accelerator. Because it pretty much "clicks" on all of the links on a page, if you have prefetching enabled when viewing a Web application, it will probably start "clicking" on the "delete item" links!
I've heard about this before, when people were complaining about web crawlers doing a similar thing. This though is worse, because some basic authentication isn't really going to help!
Steve has blogged this problem, plus code enabling you to block Google Web Accelerator, as has
Pete Freitag.
Others have also stated that we should just suck it, and fix our web applications to conform to the
RFC, and ensure that links (e.g. GET methods) are soley used for retrieval, and use POST methods for operations such as "delete item". I'm leaning more towards the later, but I think we all have to aware of the prefetching features in this product...
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