Date: 10/08/05 (Mozilla)    Keywords: html, web, google

I downloaded an extension called FasterFox (http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/)... I find that it is a nice little tweak utility, however there's one feature they advertise that I'm not sure if it's 'safe' to use.


Prefetch Links
Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with Firefox's unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing.

My question is - does this only prefetch content marked somehow for prefetching? Or does it just randomly grab any HTML link it sees?

Because if it just grabs every link it sees, it could be extremely dangerous... lots of links are of the type "click on me and something serious happens, like your account is deleted"... or mail gets marked read on a webmail server, etc...

I had used Google Web Accellerator for a brief amount of time, and this kind of prefetching was one of its features.. I had to throw it away due to that kind of problems... webpages would act strange if you just randomly clicked on links... Static pages are okay, but dynamic content it is dangerous to just download every link willy-nilly..

So does this prefetch feature take that into consideration? They talk about it like it's built into FireFox, so I would hope it does have some mechanism to know when prefetching is safe.. the onjly way I can see that working is if webpages marked content safe to prefetch...

Anyone know some details on this?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/mozilla/327949.html