Sunday, May 08, 2005
Side effects of Google Web Accelerator begin to appear
It turns out that Google's Web Accelerator is a beta for a reason. People have started to see side effects, almost all related to the "Prefetch" feature. It seems that the prefetch feature fetches links that execute commands, such as "Delete account", and ignore javascript popups. This has caused some trouble with certain web apps.
Personally I've found that it messes up PHPBB2's remembering of which posts you've viewed. One visit to the forum and then it thinks you've read ALL posts.
After learning about the problems with prefetching, I disabled it in the settings. However, as I left on the feature that double-underlines prefetched links, GWA seems to still be prefetching pages that I have not yet visited.
I guess caution is in order if you want to try GWA (Which is currently not accepting new beta testers). To be fair, it is a beta, which means it is expected to have problems. Still, a very neat piece of software, and I do hope they work the bugs out.
Personally I've found that it messes up PHPBB2's remembering of which posts you've viewed. One visit to the forum and then it thinks you've read ALL posts.
After learning about the problems with prefetching, I disabled it in the settings. However, as I left on the feature that double-underlines prefetched links, GWA seems to still be prefetching pages that I have not yet visited.
I guess caution is in order if you want to try GWA (Which is currently not accepting new beta testers). To be fair, it is a beta, which means it is expected to have problems. Still, a very neat piece of software, and I do hope they work the bugs out.
