Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Prefetching for Mozilla Browsers

Posted by Zonk on from the two-great-tastes-that-go-great-together dept.

kv9 writes "A post on GoogleBlog reveals that Google has enabled results prefetching for Mozilla based browsers, which means that the top results of queries are being loaded in the background and pages will load faster. More info on the Mozilla Prefetching FAQ and the Google Webmaster FAQ"

25 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Watch for this... by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can see employees being confronted for browsing pages they never actually looked at. An obvious example: innocently searching for info on the silly Vin Diesel movie "XXX" turns up a nice mix of Vin and pr0n in the top results. Presumably a mix of both are loading up in the background

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:Watch for this... by the_mad_poster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Prefetching is one of those things that seems like a really great idea on paper, but doesn't hold up so well in practice.

      The problem is that you have things like 'rel=next' that expect the user to go to some next "logical" page, but no structure to a site to encourage that logic. You get people upping bandwidth costs and slowing down browsing time because the site maintainer THINKS they'll go to some next page but the site design actually ENCOURAGES them to go to some other, unrelated page.

      In OSS, a lot of the maintainers and coders are just "hackers" or college kids contributing bits and pieces of less broad knowledge over a bigger project team, not real software engineers who have been trained to really think through the consequences of certain design decisions. They don't research their target audience to realize that, while the prefetching feature would be great in a perfect world, the world isn't perfect, and it can really cause problems when so many people are moving from professional browsers to more amateur ones that test out these features in what they THINK is a mainly geek-oriented audience.

      I could see why someone at Google might think this is a good idea, but I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better.

      --
      Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
    2. Re:Watch for this... by argent · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You get people upping bandwidth costs and slowing down browsing time because the site maintainer THINKS they'll go to some next page but the site design actually ENCOURAGES them to go to some other, unrelated page.

      There are extensive studies from third parties on what people look at and do when they search on google. And you know what, they found people tend to look at and go to the top result, and don't even glance below the top few results most of the time.

      I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better.

      I'd expect that Google has better figures on where people go to from Google's search pages than anyone else.

    3. Re:Watch for this... by bfields · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Prefetching is one of those things that seems like a really great idea on paper, but doesn't hold up so well in practice.

      The page you cite in support appears to be an argument specifically against prefetching pages with the rel=next attribute. As you say:

      The problem is that you have things like 'rel=next' that expect the user to go to some next "logical" page, but no structure to a site to encourage that logic.

      That's a flaw in firefox's prefetching logic, not in site-designers' use of rel=next, which was never intended to be used to indicate links the user was most likely to follow.

      In any case, google is actually using rel="prefetch", which *is* intended for that purpose. And google's use looks pretty sensible: "This tag is only inserted when it is likely that the user will click on the first link." From experimenting it appears that it's only used on some searches; e.g. the example they give is the first hit on a search for "stanford". So presumably they have fairly good evidence that a user is actually likely to click on such a link--I suspect they have enough data on this that they don't need to just guess.

      In OSS, a lot of the maintainers and coders are just "hackers" or college kids contributing bits and pieces of less broad knowledge over a bigger project team, not real software engineers who have been trained to really think through the consequences of certain design decisions.... I could see why someone at Google might think this is a good idea, but I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better.

      I think you're making some huge generalizations here based on very little evidence.

      --Bruce Fields

    4. Re:Watch for this... by shaitand · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In commercial development, a lot of the maintainers and coders are just "hacks" or college grads, who know how to write a resume and interview well, contributing bits and pieces of less broad knowledge over a smaller project team, not real experienced software engineers doing what they want to do and who have the brains or inclination to really think through the consequences of all design decisions.

      "and it can really cause problems when so many people are moving from professional browsers to more amateur ones that test out these features in what they THINK is a mainly geek-oriented audience."

      Precisely what browsers are you referring to? Perhaps you would care to let us know which browsers your highness believes to be "Professional" and which he believes are "more amateur". In general, I would contend the latter are actually superior browsers and that is why people move to them. Every browser I know of goes through a development, alpha, and beta stage to test features before final release. Also, google is implementing this, not a browser.

      "I could see why someone at Google might think this is a good idea, but I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better."

      Perhaps they do not use rel=next attributes and believe they have a bit more data at their fingertips than you do. Maybe, just maybe, you are the one who has not performed any research and google has in fact examined a great deal of data. Maybe that data even tells them that the number of people who continue to the top search results is staggering.

    5. Re:Watch for this... by smallpaul · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your post is confusing. First you say that prefetching doesn't work that well in practice and present a link to Simon Willison's blog. But the blog says that prefetching is an "excellent feature" except for a couple of quirks in Mozilla's implementation. Google does not trigger those quirks so they are irrelevant.

      Then you go off on a tangent about how "real software engineers" think through their design decisions more than "open source hackers". This is totally contrary to my experience. I would more highly rate the software engineering of Mozilla against Internet Explorer, Unix versus Windows or Apache versus IIS. I could go through a long list of brutal design decisions in commercial software that did not hold up in the real world but I'll just mention Clippy and the Windows registry as two high-profile examples.

      Finally, it is Google, a commercial software services company that is the topic of the article. So your whole argument is self-defeating. Either Google doesn't conform to your vision of real software engineering or the feature is not really at odds with real software engineering.

    6. Re:Watch for this... by TimeTraveler1884 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      From the FireFox prefetch FAQ:
      Is there a preference to disable link prefetching?
      Yes, there is a hidden preference that you can set to disable link prefetching. Add this line to your prefs.js file located in your Mozilla profile directory:

      user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false);

      We are considering adding UI for this preference (see bug 166648); however, our theory is that if link prefetching needs to be disabled then there must be something wrong with the implementation. We would rather improve the implementation if it does not work correctly, than simply expect users to locate some obscure preference in the preferences UI. Heck, the Mozilla preferences UI is already crowded enough ;-)


      I find this statement particulary interesting:
      We are considering adding UI for this preference (see bug 166648); however, our theory is that if link prefetching needs to be disabled then there must be something wrong with the implementation.
      Um, that is pretty arrogant to assume why people would want to disable things. Until I read this article I didn't even know that Firefox did this. I don't like it one bit from a security standpoint. I don't want my browser running around going to sites that I don't intened to visit. And certainly, not because Google tells my browser to do so.

      I suppose at the very least, it can be disabled.

    7. Re:Watch for this... by cyt0plas · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Actually, google does log search results, just not all the time. Occasionally, I will see them do a redirect in the search results of stuff I search for. Also, it shows up in the log files as a google referer without a query.

      I don't remember the exact tracking URL they use, though.

      --
      Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
    8. Re:Watch for this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I guess you've never heard of a little 45,000 person company called Sun Microsystems.

    9. Re:Watch for this... by argent · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do you mean this hoax?

      What hoax? He disagrees with the basis of the study. That doesn't mean the study is fraudulent (that IS what the term "hoax" implies) nor that his disagreement is valid. In addition, his complaint is that the study may not actually be useful for marketeers... NOT that it's irrelevant to this discussion.

  2. MSIE/MSN by mirko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does somebody knows whether MSIE and MSN collaborate the same way?
    Anyway it could be obvious that Google tries to establishes such alliances against his main concurrent (besides Yahoo).

    --
    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  3. Re:Gone already? by kubrick · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not sure if it changed, or if the submitter or editor mangled the link...

    http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#prefetch ing

    Based on where it's inserting the space, I'd say both. (Submitter mangled, editor posted without checking.)

    --
    deus does not exist but if he does
  4. This is Potentially Dangerous by cyranoVR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ever heard of the concept "one click and you're guilty?" Users of this feature who unknowingly perform a search that returns results containting offensive/illegal content may find themselves being prosecuted by local, state or Federal authorities...

    Proof of concept: Google caught in anti-Semitism flap. Replace "anti-semitism" with "child pornography" and you'll understand what I'm getting at...

    1. Re:This is Potentially Dangerous by stewby18 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How many innocuous Google searches return illegal content as the top hit and have data suggesting to Google that enough people follow that first link that it should be prefetched?

  5. I think I'll leave it off by oneandoneis2 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I use FF in my job at a pharmaceutical company, and looking for some medical terms in Google can often bring up some results of sites I really don't want to be visiting (Well, not from work, anyway *ahem* )

    The last thing I want is for those pages to show up in the company's web access logs, so I think I'll skip this feature when I'm at work.

    --
    So.. it has come to this
  6. PS... by argent · · Score: 2, Insightful

    PS: Google on "google triangle" and you'll see why they picked this page to prefetch...

    Though I'd like them to prefetch the "next search page" as well... at least, that would tend to speed up *my* googling. I'm probably atypical, though, if they don't do it...

  7. This is great! by Slashcrap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless :

    You have an ADSL line with a really stingy cap (for instance BT in the UK offer a cheap service with a 1GB/month cap). I'm sure their customers will be happy about downloading pages they won't read.

    You're a web admin that pays a lot for bandwith. I bet they'll be really happy that lots of people will be downloading their pages without ever looking at them.

    You're at work surfing through a proxy that does filtering / logging and there are some dubious sites that get pre-fetched for you. Enjoy getting sacked for something you didn't do!

    Well, I don't know about you, but I'm struggling to see any drawbacks to this great new technology!

  8. RE: uhoh... by fshalor · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So , that means if I *accidentidly* search for a pron related topic, or pron is definatly in the top responses from google, It gets downloaded without me doing anything?

    --
    -=fshalor ::this post not spellchecked. move along::
  9. It should be off by default.... by jonr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think it would make more sense if network.prefetch-next would be set to false by default. Then gearheads could turn it on if they wanted.

  10. Re:Padding? by nautical9 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    If you're referring to the sites that google's adding the prefetch links for, then no - since there's no "clicking" happening for anything but the result page. If anything, the impression to click ratios will go down, because the page (and the google image ads on it) are being loaded, but the client will never click on it because he never saw it.

    If you're referring to potential click-fraud that a malicious site may do by adding a bunch of "prefetch" links on their page that points to the ad, I seriously doubt it, since no one but the client's machine knows what the links are (since I believe they're loaded at the time the image is generated).

    Perhaps an enterprising fraudster may write some clever javascript that waits for the google ad to load, and then generates the prelinks - but I doubt the browser would then notice the change and go prefetch them. Besides, it'd be easier to just make an invisible frame and set it's href location. But again, I doubt you can dynamically figure out what the google ad click URLs are with javascript alone.

  11. Re:But usually the top links on google by LoverOfJoy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or it'd get a lot of spammers voting their crap in quite quickly

  12. Re:Trouble at work, trouble with law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Please. Any website can download things that you don't want it to. All you have to do is a <img src="http://www.example.com/" alt="" width="0" height="0"> and access logs will "show" that you visited example.com.

    If your boss or the police accuse you of something, then quite frankly they are clueless and would accuse you of the same thing on even flimsier evidence. The correct solution is to decapitate these clueless cretins, not disable useful technology.

  13. Even More Problems by Valdrax · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Forget the Feds, you're much more likely to get nailed by your IT department for this. I wonder if a user who was unaware of this feature and got fired thanks to links loaded by it could sue the Mozilla Foundation. I can just see some malicious little asshole putting hidden (via color) links in their webpages that download utterly offensive crap just to see if they can get someone fired. I especially expect this sort of thing from the same sort of Slashdot trolls who posted that infinite pop-up of gay porn thing in the Firefox Hacks story.

    I also expect that this will be abused by unscrupulous websites who want to run up their ad revenue by having people preload a page full of ads. Many people have already expressed concerns for those who have slow connections or who do not have unlimited access. This could also be used by spammers to verify people who are smart enough to have web-bugs disabled via cookie and image blocking on emails but who don't know about preloading if the Thunderbird people enable this in email (which would be foolish beyond belief).

    I just think this concept is a horrible idea.

    --
    If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
    1. Re:Even More Problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I also expect that this will be abused by unscrupulous websites who want to run up their ad revenue by having people preload a page full of ads.

      Yeah, because Google adding a prefetch tag to the results will help the ad-spammers... what are you thinking?

      Have you seen the web? There are plenty of web sites that load pages of ads without the need for prefetching (think JavaScript). The ad spammers could care less about prefetching.

      Many people have already expressed concerns for those who have slow connections or who do not have unlimited access.

      RTFA before you complain about it... Firefox only prefetches links when not downloading anything else. It will not slow down your browsing at all regardless of your connection speed.

      This could also be used by spammers to verify people who are smart enough to have web-bugs disabled via cookie and image blocking on emails but who don't know about preloading if the Thunderbird people enable this in email (which would be foolish beyond belief).

      Likewise, I think it's a bad idea for you to have email because it can be used for spam. Just think about all the spammers who can use your email account to send out junkmail (presuming that you don't have a password on your account).

      Just because you post without thinking doesn't meann developers code without thinking!

  14. Re:Trouble at work, trouble with law by Rommel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is just another reason the current practice of criminalizing the possession of knowledge is crazy.